Russian Reflections on Kindness

1.

When nineteenth-­century novelists exposed the hy­poc­risy of cruel ­people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned ac­cep­tance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hy­poc­risy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. But “for our generation, kindness was an old-­fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Every­thing we have seen in our times—­the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant ‘unmasking’ of p­eople . . .  all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind.” To be sure, kindness survived, but it “had to be sought in remote places that were deaf to the call of the age. Only the inert kept ­these qualities as they had come down from their ancestors. Every­one e­lse had been affected by the inverted ‘humanism’ of the times.”

–Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, 235-236

2.

Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is every day human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water flask, the kindness of youth towards old age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother.

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.

But if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is in fact eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.

Even at the most terrible times, through all the mad acts carried out in the name of Universal Good and the glory of States, times when people were tossed about like branches in the wind, filling ditches and gullies like stones in an avalanche – even then this senseless, pathetic kindness remained scattered throughout life like atoms of radium.

–Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, 407-408