The Fortune Teller of the Don

There are encounters that war should not allow, and yet they happen. Two men find themselves face to face, one armed and the other not, and for a moment the machinery of killing jams. Something human slips in between the sights and the target.

It was dawn on 16 December 1942. Along the middle course of the Don, in the snow-covered steppes of southern Russia, Operation Little Saturnwas being launched: the Soviet offensive that would shatter the Italian front and seal the fate of Stalingrad. Among the Russian soldiers of the 38th Guards Rifle Division was a nineteen-year-old boy, a talented draughtsman with a passion for art. His name was Lev Ivanovič Zhdanov.

Of that day he wrote — many years later — one of the most extraordinary pages of war memoirs and of the ARMIR, and one unknown to us: his encounter with a wounded Italian Bersagliere among the fields of dead sunflowers. And the thought that immediately came to his mind: Caravaggio.

The assault, the bunker, and then — a figure among the sunflowers

The attack on the Italian trenches began with the climb up the side of an icy ravine. The bullets whistled — “piu-u-u, piu-u-u” — and his back, drenched in sweat, froze with every burst. A comrade was hit full on by a mine before Zhdanov’s eyes: after the explosion nothing remained but a hole, something shapeless, and on the snow pinkish stains of blood, as if they were flowers.

His lieutenant advanced upright, without ducking. Then he jumped into the Italian trench. Zhdanov followed him. There were bodies that gave way softly under their feet. The Italians were coming out of the communication trenches with their hands up, shouting something. Inside an abandoned bunker — walls of white planks, the stove still lit — he found an engraved, gilded pistol under the pillow. Then he went back out into the cold.

“Italiano! Italiano!” the wounded man began to moan, hurriedly. A comrade shouted from a distance: “Who’s there?” — “A wounded Italian.” — “Shoot him!” — and walked on.

Zhdanov lowered his rifle. How can I “shoot him”? We are not in combat. I cannot kill a wounded man, not even an enemy. He pointed the Italian towards the main road: “Over there is the medicine! The medicine!” He saw in the other man’s eyes a warmth, something like gratitude. He thought: Perhaps the local civilians will pick him up. It happened.

Caravaggio’s young man and the Bersagliere in the sunflowers

That face — round, curly-haired, with deep black eyes — had already crossed Zhdanov’s mind. When he saw it in the snow, something clicked: an image seen in a school magazine, a reproduction of an old Roman painting.

La Buona Ventura, or The Fortune Teller: an early work by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, painted around 1594. A young gypsy girl reads the palm of an elegant gentleman. The young man has a round face, curly hair, deep black eyes. He does not know that his ring is being slipped off his finger while he smiles at the beautiful fortune teller. The painting exists in two versions, kept in the Capitoline Museums in Rome and in the Louvre in Paris.

Caravaggio was Lombard, born in Milan to a family from Bergamo. And the prayer book that Zhdanov was about to find in the snow — it had been printed in Bergamo. A coincidence the Russian soldier could not have known. But the two threads touched, even without anyone holding them.

The fortune teller’s gentleman does not know that his ring is being slipped off. He smiles at the gypsy girl, trusting, a little naive. The Bersagliere in the sunflowers knew nothing of what was happening around him — he did not know about the offensive, he did not understand the language of the boy who was looking at him, he did not know whether he would survive the next hour. But he too looked out with those eyes: large, black, full of a desperate trust.

An artist’s eye never goes out, not even in war. On the contrary: in war it is perhaps sharper, because every moment could be the last, and so every moment deserves to be truly seen. Zhdanov carried within him an archive of images — the art magazines, the reproductions, the school lessons. And when reality set before him a face strong enough to activate that archive, the connection clicked into place by itself.

“That face… Very like that Italian soldier who stayed there, in the sunflowers of the Don…”

Lev Ivanovič Zhdanov wrote these memoirs long after the war. He had forgotten nothing. He had the prayer book on the table as he wrote; he opened it from time to time, looked at the little Madonna and Child on the first page, and reread the dedication in Italian, which he did not understand but had copied out letter by letter.

It was an object that forced him to remember. Not the battle — that he remembered anyway. But that precise moment: the wounded man in the sunflowers, the choice not to shoot, the look of gratitude. And then the thought that had never entirely left him.

The little book from Bergamo — two inscriptions on the same page

When he picked the little book up from the snow, Zhdanov understood nothing of what was written in it. But he took it with him. It was a humble object: a book of military prayers, published in Bergamo in 1939 by the chaplain Don Tamanza and distributed to the soldiers of the Bergamo garrison before they left for the front. A black cloth cover, a little Madonna and Child on the first inside page.

On the first page there was an inscription. Someone had written by hand, in a hurried or dialect-tinged script:

Someone — an uncle, perhaps — had given that little book to the soldier as he left for Russia. He leaves you this keepsake. As if they already knew.

Zhdanov faithfully copied out the Latin characters, letter by letter, as one does with a foreign alphabet. Then he added his own inscription, in his own language: “16 December 1942 — beyond the River Don, near Bogučar.”

Two inscriptions, two languages, two moments. An uncle from Bergamo saying goodbye to a departing nephew. And a young Russian who finds in the snow the only trace left of him.

What Zhdanov saw in those black eyes

And Caravaggio — the painter from Bergamo — could not have known that a painting of his, painted in Rome in 1594, would cross three and a half centuries to appear in a field of sunflowers on the Don, in the winter of 1942, in the thoughts of a soldier who had chosen not to shoot.

Zhdanov could not have known that the little book had been printed in Bergamo, like the painter. But without knowing it he held both threads in his hands: the face of the Bersagliere, and the face of the gentleman in The Fortune Teller. The same city, the same human type, three and a half centuries apart, and a field of dead sunflowers on the Don as the meeting point.

Sources: Lev Ivanovič Zhdanov, typewritten memoirs · School Museum of Poltavka, Bogučar district · boguchar-pamyat.ru · stalingrad-battle.ru · Volgograd Pravda, 22 August 2014