For a moment this sense of [Sofya Levinton’s] past blotted out everything present, blotted out the abyss. It was the very strangest of feelings, something you could never share with any other person—not even your wife, your mother, your brother, your son, your friend or your father. It was the secret of your soul. However passionately it might long to, your soul could never betray this secret. You carry away this sense of your life without having ever shared it with anyone: the miracle of a particular individual whose conscious and unconscious contain everything good and bad, everything funny, sweet, shameful, pitiful, timid, tender, uncertain, that has happened from childhood to old age—fused into the mysterious sense of an individual life.
—Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, translated by Robert Chandler
