1 - ‘Good? But what is good?’ Ethics after Ikonnikov

Summary

Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.

Vasily Grossman

The hero of this tale is a former Tolstoyan called Ikonnikov-Morzh, who is surely destined to find his place as one of the great characters of world literature. He might be called a Shakespearian character, if he were not so intimately associated with Vasily Grossman. Ethically and politically, his works and days are of the first importance.

He is given an outline biography in Grossman's great novel, Life and Fate (published in English in 1985), a kind of Second World War and Peace. His forebears had all been priests, but Ikonnikov received a lay education. In his final year at the Petersburg Institute of Technology he was converted to the teachings of Tolstoy. He left the institute to become a people's teacher in a village to the north of Perm. After eight years he quit the village and went to Odessa. There he was taken on as an engine-room mechanic in a merchant ship. He voyaged to India and Japan; he lived for a while in Sydney. After the Revolution he returned to Russia and joined a peasant commune. He believed that Communist agricultural labour would bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, but he found that was not to be. He lived through collectivization, depopulation, starvation. He was no stranger to famine. He began preaching the Gospel; he became a little unhinged. He spent a year in a prison psychiatric hospital. After his release he went to live with his elder brother, a professor of biology, in Byelorussia. In 1941, Byelorussia was invaded. Ikonnikov knew something of the war of annihilation on the Eastern Front. He also knew what was happening to the Jews. He begged people to give them sanctuary; he tried to save women and children himself. Miraculously, he escaped the gallows.

He is first encountered as a prisoner of war in a German concentration camp, in a hut with several others ‘of special interest to the Gestapo’, including Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy, an Old Bolshevik; an assortment of Russian officers; and Gardi, an Italian priest.