Everything Flows

Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his epic Life and Fate. Ivan Grigoryevich has been in the Gulag for thirty years. Released after Stalin s death, he finds that the years of terror have imposed a collective moral slavery. He must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan s story is only one among many Grossman had too much to say, and too short a time to live, to concern himself with conventional novel-writing. Thus we also hear about Ivan s cousin, Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, and Pinegin, the informer who had Ivan sent to the camps. Then comes a series of informers, each making excuses for their inexcusable deeds inexcusable and yet, they plead, in Stalinist Russia understandable, almost unavoidable. And at the core of the book, we find the story of Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan s lover, who tells of her involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932 3, which led to the deaths of three to five million Ukrainian peasants. Everything Flows is an unbearably lucid

About the Author :
Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941 he became a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin and the consequences of the Holocaust, work collected in A Writer at War. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of it being published for another 200 years. Grossman began Everything Flows in 1955 and was still working on it during his last days in hospital in September 1964.

Review :
Everything Flows is as important a novel as anything written by Solzhenitsyn, and this superb translation makes it a joy to read Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR As eloquent a memorial to the anonymous little man in the Stalinist state as Dr Zhivago is to the artistic spirit in post-Czarist Russia and The First Circle to the scientific intelligentsia