Different Interpretations of Grossman’s Philosophy in Early Western Reception: Levinas, Todorov, Giussani

Vasily Grossman’s early reception in Western countries (1980–2005) includes essential philosophical interpretations. Among them, we find the celebrated insights of Tzvetan Todorov (1996) and Emmanuel Lévinas (1988, 1991). Lévinas interprets Grossman within his vision of an ethics that transcends all metaphysics, while Todorov makes him a champion of a new humanism with an Enlightenment tone. The first wave of Western interpreters also includes Luigi Giussani, who inserts Grossman within his conception of religious sense and reasoning (1980) as a mechanism for asking totalizing questions that identify God as the only possible partner of human rationality. The article focuses on these three authors and then hints at proposing an indepth view of metaphysical realism derived from the most recent studies on the Russian author. This kind of realism also accounts for the three positions mentioned.