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Everything Flows (New York Review Books Classics)

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I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us."
Anna Akhmatova's Requiem

If Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) may rightfully be seen as Vasily Grossman's masterpiece, his Everything Flows may rightfully be seen as his testament, a requiem if you will not only for his own life but for the lives of those who lived in his time and place.

"Everything Flows" tells a simple, yet emotionally deep and politically nuanced tale. The story begins with the 1957 return to Moscow of Ivan Grigoryevich after 30 years of forced labor in the Gulag. 1957 marked the year, following Khrushchev's denunciation of the excesses of Stalin, in which the tide of prisoners returning from the Gulag reached its peak. He arrives at the Moscow flat of his cousin Nikolay. Nikolay, a scientist with less than stellar skills, has reached some measure of success at the laboratory through dint of being a survivor. The meeting in the flat is entirely unsatisfactory for both parties. Grossman paints a vivid picture of Nikolay, more than a bit jealous that Ivan's light had always shone brighter than his own prior to Ivan's arrest. Nikolay suffers from the guilt of one who was not arrested and who is painfully aware of the choices he made to keep from being arrested. It seems clear that Ivan represents a mirror into which Nikolay can see only his own hollow reflection.

Ivan leaves Moscow for his old city of Leningrad, the place where he was first arrested in 1927. By chance, he runs into the person, Pinegin, whose denunciation placed him in jail in the first place. Once again, Ivan is a mirror and Pinegin is horrified at what he is faced with, what he has buried for thirty years. Ironically, and to great effect, we see Pinegin's horror recede once he settles down to a sumptuous lunch at a restaurant reserved for foreigners and party officials. Ivan does not know about the denunciation and Grossman here embarks on a discourse on the different types and forms of denunciation available to the Soviet citizen. It is a remarkable discourse that shows how many different ways there are to participate in a purge and how many ways there are to legitimize ones participation and/or acquiescence.

From Leningrad Ivan travels to a southern industrial city where he finds work and eventually finds a deep and satisfying love in the person of his landlady Anna. The centerpiece of that relationship is the brutal honesty involved; Anna spends a night detailing her role in the pointless, needless famine that swept the Ukraine in 1932-1933. It is an account made even more chilling by the straightforward, confessional nature of its telling. But it is also redemptive and shines a light on what might be called Grossman's vision that love and freedom are two goals, not mutually exclusive, that an honest accounting of our lives forms the essence of our shared humanity.

The above summary does not do justice to the power of Grossman's prose or to the literary and political importance of the work. Since the death of Stalin, the Soviet line had remained relatively firm - Stalin's excesses were the product of a disturbed mind that represented a horrible deviation from the theory and principles of Leninism. The USSR's best path was the one that returned it to the path created by Lenin. Khrushchev first enunciated this line. Even Gorbachev's perestroika was based on the theory that a return to first-principles, i.e. Leninism, would save the USSR from destruction.

Grossman, prophetically, did not buy into this line and Everything Flows'last chapters are notable for a remarkable attack not only on Stalin but on Lenin and Lenin's anti-democratic tendencies that had more in common with Ivan the Terrible than the principles of revolutionary democracy. "All the triumphs of Party and State were bound up with the name of Lenin. But all the cruelty inflicted on the nation also lay - tragically - on Lenin's shoulders." Grossman may have been the first to make this leap and he paid the price for making that leap. (This involves the suppression of his Life & Fate and Everything Flows.) Grossman's explicit claim that Stalin was not a deviationist from Leninism but its natural-born progeny was profoundly subversive and there is no doubt in my mind that it was this difference that explains why, under Khruschev's 'thaw', that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was publishe while Life and Fate and Everything Flows was banned.

Despite the horrors set out, quietly and without excess rhetoric, Grossman returns to a somewhat optimistic vision of mans search for freedom: "No matter how mighty the empire, all this is only mist and fog and, as such, will be blown away. Only one true force remains; only one true force continues to evolve and live; and this force is liberty. To a man, to live means to be free."

Robert Chandler's translation of Everything Flows is exquisite. He brings the same clarity and emotional investment in Grossman's work that he brought to his prize-winning translations of Platonov and Hamid Ismailov's The Railway. In short, Everything Flows is a treasure and I cannot recommend this book highly enough. L. Fleisig

I just finished "Everything Flows." It is one of literature's great gifts, one of the most insightful and moving books I have ever read. In a way, it is both uplifting and humbling at the same time. I just cannot say enough about the "testament" that this book is. Through Grossman's work, we, in some small way, can bear witness to an entire, tragic era.

I will not repeat the details of Leonard Fleisig's outstanding and astute review of "Everything Flows," but simply add that this short book is a novella with connected essays that somehow reveals both the nature of the individual characters and of a whole society under siege. It is beautifully written and translated, and with great economy of style, Ivan and the other characters come alive and we seem to enter their inner beings.

I have read a great deal about the Soviet experience, including Grossman's "Life and Fate" and Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography of Stalin and Stephen Cohen's one on Bukharin as well as the wonderful novels of Victor Serge. I highly recommend them all, but if you have to read one book about the Soviet tragedy, read "Everything Flows."

I am so grateful to the New York Review of Books for retrieving so many lost treasures from the past.

A man returns from thirty years in the Gulag. He meets up with his cousin, who has done well, with the man who denounced him, with a woman--his landlady--who becomes his lover and tells him about her experiences, her complicity in the Ukrainian terror famine (a devastating chapter). The man meditates on the nature of Russia and the totalitarian state. This magnificent novel does not really have a plot, in the sense of a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end where everything gets tied up in a satisfactory knot. As the very title indicates, everything flows and keeps on flowing. Nor will you find here Solzhenitsyn's savage indignation, but at the same time, in reading Grossman's novel you don't get off the hook by feeling that any of these people are so alien to you or to what you might have done or not done under similar circumstances. And as Chandler so beautifully puts it in his introduction, "Any story, truly told and truly listened to, can become a gift."
The book includes an introduction, notes, a chronology--all very helpful. There is a previous translation of this novel (under the title Forever Flowing), which Chandler's version totally supersedes.

It's difficult for me to write about a moving piece of literature that doesn't resort to cheap hyperbole, expecially when all the overused descriptions and praises seem to fit. Yet 'Everything Flows' is a novel that truly does stand head and shoulders above its peers; quietly though, with little fanfare - befitting the shape and form of its content. Reminiscent of Taduesz Borowski's 'This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen' in its austere insights into human behavior, 'Everything Flows' takes Borowski's chilling observations one step further and seeks to locate the slumbering humanity within the inhuman chaos of terror amd cruelty. Where Borowski mercilessly lacerates us with the horror of the concentration camp, where fear stamps out everything human, Vasily Grossman describes the injustice of the gulag and of the State, and forgivingly looks for the redeemable within the worst of us.

Unfinished at the time of Grossman's death, 'Everything Flows' is the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, a man returning to Moscow after thirty years in a labor camp. He is released during Krushchev's 'thaw', and though the novel begins with Ivan's attempt to reintegrate into the world, as it progresses he transforms into a sort of reflective leitmotiv, one in which all segments of Soviet society can plainly see themselves. His journey toward resolution, often interupted by authorial interludes, is an examination of a people reared by and brought to heel by the State - they are complicit and victim all at once, and Grossman suggests temperance rather than recrimination.

Grossman is not rhetorical nor sentimental, but I find it difficult not to be affected by his sparse lyricism and plain honesty. This is a work that courageously appreciates the complexity of all of us, instead of repeating safe illusions that conceal our inner workings. That, to me, is a testament to the same power that sustains Ivan through the camps and even through his release - an undaunted faith in freedom. Highly recommended.

Having read Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, and his collection of short stories and essays in The Road, I was resolved to find and read more of his work, hence my purchase of Everything Flows. This work, reputedly unfinished at the time of his death is written in a slightly different style than his other books.

In Everything Flows, Grossman pens an indictment on Soviet style Communism, most jarringly its complete depersonalization and absence of freedom. Whereas his earlier work did so through fictionalized short stories (and his magnum opus Life and Fate), this work is a more literary and intellectual analysis of Lenin's movement and Stalin's progression. As a result, I found it less captivating. I would not say, however, that it is without feeling.

Much as he did in his landmark essay "The Hell of Treblinka", Grossman puts a human face on the Ukrainian Terror Famine of the early 1930s, an event not commonly known, but equal in scope to the Holocaust and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia. Stalin and his henchmen oversaw a process of deportation of Ukrainian kulaks (peasant farmers), collectivization and confiscation of all foodstuffs. Thus it was that in one of the most fertile regions on Earth, in the absence of epidemic or drought, from 4-6 million people starved to death. It is Grossman's contention that this was not an error in planning or a failure in communication, but a cold blooded genocide of what Stalin considered some of his least faithful followers.

I found parts of this relatively short work to be riveting. However, long sections bogged down in intellectual analysis which quite literally lost me. It is certainly worthwhile if for no other reason than its treatment of the Terror Famine.

This brief, simple book towers above what most people will read in their lifetime. Like his earlier masterpiece, "Life and Fate", this book takes you to every corner of despair, of cruelty, of evil. Even more than his earlier work, "Everything Flows" is absolutely ruthless in its account of the sheer evil of the Soviet Union, particularly during the 1930s. You will never forget Grossman's description of the pogrom against the Kulacks. His account of the Ukrainian Famine has got to be one of the most chilling accounts you'll ever read. The steady drumbeat of Grossman's dispassionate words and sentences only emphasizes the horror of these times even more. There is no discernible plot here, only a portrayal of one of the cruelest regimes ever to exist. Lenin and the murderous thug Stalin, are revealed in all their limitless perfidy. The whole point of the book is a plea that freedom is the most important thing in life, which the protagonist Ivan Grigoryevich realizes only after having been imprisoned for 30 years solely because he was falsely denounced by an opportunist. This is truly a remarkable and unforgettable book.

I hardly feel capable of reviewing Grossman. He is a moral giant. His soaring language and his massive indictment of the historical crimes he lived through leave me breathless and at a loss for words. Grossman was barely edited in his time as his work was suppressed. But he really couldn't have been edited: who has the moral authority to change one word of an author like this? And which gainfully-employed-by-the-glorious-people's-state editor might have had clean enough hands to grapple with this?

This unfinished book is an essay, a contemplation of the Russia of Stalin's terror, in the guise of a novel. It's a lot shorter than "Life and Fate." It begins and ends, but you can see he may have chosen, had he had more time - this was his last work before he died - to do a fair bit of rewriting.

As a novel, there isn't much. Ivan Grigoryevich, once a gifted student but now having survived 30 years in the Gulag, is released following Stalin's death. He goes to Moscow, where a cousin, a careerist scientist, squirms in his presence. He goes to Leningrad where he walks by the house of the woman he once loved, now married to someone else. He gets a job in a small town and falls in love with his landlady, who then dies. He takes a walk through the town where he grew up. That's it.

This doesn't begin to describe what's in here, which is Grossman's contemplation in the gossamer-thin guise of Ivan's thoughts. But, then, this is a Russian novel, with that enormous tradition of doing exactly this - the author mulling fate, life, death, destiny, philosophy and politics directly, often without bothering to put it in a character's thoughts or words. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy did it in huge, sprawling novels where such passages weighed in as relatively brief episodes. Here, they're most of the book.

Grossman considers the informers, who sent people like Ivan to the camps and death, in all their many flavors. He mulls the life of the camps, transports, and transit prisons. He takes us through prisoners' lows and highs as they are interrogated. He describes how women particularly suffered in the camps, and the way of death there. In horrific detail he visits the Ukrainian peasant famine, through the eyes of Ivan's new love, a witness to the death by deliberate starvation of millions.

He considers the changing generations of Russia's leadership: the old Bolsheviks dedicated to revolution, then the builders of the 1920s and 1930s dedicated to the state, then the corrupt bureaucrats dedicated to their own enrichment. He takes a long, hard look at Lenin, rather than the more frequently blamed Stalin, and sees in both a continuation of Russia's 900-year tradition of progress tied to enslavement. He sees Stalin as the fullest manifestation of Lenin's thought, refusing to take the post-Stalinist line that Stalin represented some kind of deviation.

He introduces characters who have no connection at all to Ivan Grigoryevich, tells their harrowing stories, and then lets them disappear - much like the characters who come in and out of the fog of war during "Life and Fate". A Ukrainian peasant family; a woman sent to the camps; a Jewish old Bolshevik who can't comprehend why, as a true believer, he's now being singled out for persecution.

Grossman fascinates because he is unsparing in his consideration of everyone, including himself, seeing the life of every non-prisoner during this time as being tainted - by having informed, by having looked the other way, by having signed false denunciations, by having lapsed into passivity while others were taken away, glad that they themselves were spared for the moment. Nor does he permit himself and the reader the easy or self-righteous condemnation of these people. He paints them with varying degrees of culpability, but at bottom simply human, frail, flawed, most of them bowing before the weight of the terror state. And both he and Ivan, at all odds with reality, retain their idealism, their conclusion that at the end of the day, after a thousand years of Russian slavery in various forms, the thing that matters most is freedom.

I wonder what Grossman might or might not have read by the time he died in 1964. Near the end comes a strong echo of Albert Camus' "The Stranger", published two years before. And it might easily be read jointly with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's better-known "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", which chronicles a day in a prisoner's life in the Gulag. It might actually serve as a sequel. Solzhenitsyn's work covered territory similar to Grossman's, but Solzhenitsyn was alive, his works published in the West; Grossman by then was dead and hardly anything of his book-length work had been published at home or abroad. Grossman's work was also resisted abroad to some extent by émigré Russians because it was the work of a Jew.

This is yet one more part of Grossman's impressive lifetime work. Had much of his work been widely published before his death, it would have been a crime against humanity (I love presuming to speak for "humanity", even if I'm not French or a socialist) had he not won the Nobel Prize, which is not given posthumously.

But these days, you have to be a left-leaning US President for at least five weeks to win one. And then, hey, it's easy. The 20th century's own Tolstoy would probably have found it a lot harder.

This is not a novel - not really - even though it tells the story of Ivan Grigoryevich returning to his Russian birthplace, to his old friends and his remaining family in 1953 several months after Stalin's death and 30 years after he was sentenced without cause to the camps based on a "denunciation" from a friend. No, it is an eloquent, emotional beautifully written and angry essay disguised as fiction against State tyranny and State injustice, a cry of pain, a farewell, an ending, a lament, a benediction for and a tribute to the millions who were deliberately killed by the manufactured "famine" in the Ukraine in the 1930s or by the millions more who were denounced and removed from life to the camps during the 1930s or executed through quixotic choice during the 20 years of Stalin's reign.

It is description of true Evil, of Moloch, Beelzebub, Satan and the Devil who, traveling as one, exterminated a quarter of the Russian population between 1930 and 1953 for absolutely no reason that History can explain other than the insanities birthed by the Party and Stalin's deep seated psychopathic insecurity, an insecurity which possessed him - dominated him - so strongly that he was compelled to eliminate not only those who were in fact a threat to him but also those who might in the future constitute a threat to him - plus all their families, wives, children and grandchildren. He was possessed by it. He took a masochistic delight in it. It was an appetite that could never be satiated. He was no Pol Pot, James Taylor of Robert Mugabe. He was in a class by himself, a class of one, a class that one hopes and prays we never see again. His and the Party's actions were the ultimate in Crimes against Humanity.

What did I think of the book? Being very honest with you, it was one of the most eloquent pieces of writing I have ever read - and one of the most emotional. I simply couldn't finish it. I tt was too much for me.

Imagine a world where everyone is mad and you have to act mad too in order to survive. Then imagine the world becomes somewhat sane again. This is the setting for Grossman's work. It is a wonderfully written exploration of human nature through the eyes of a survivor of the gulags who returns to a world without Stalin. As the protagonist reestablishes a place in the post Stalinist USSR, he meets the people of his past who made compromises, informed on him, or otherwise perpetuated the madness. No one is spared from Grossman's piercing examination of what drives people to do what they do to each other.

I loved 'Life and Fate', and that Tolstoy-esque performance was the basis of my hope for this book. As it turns out, it is much more of an extended rant on Soviet Communism -- there is really not very much of a story at all. It essentially deals with the main character returning from a Siberian Gulag, running into old relatives/acquaintances (among whom is the one who betrayed him), and a short segment of mooning over a lost love. Other than that, the book attacks the betrayers, the peasant famine of the early thirties, and places Lenin (instead of Stalin) as the basis for all of Russia's Post-1917 woes. Some of Grossman's insights are interesting, but the unrelenting depressive bent of the book, along with wide stretches of diatribes that don't even mention the book characters, makes this a book perhaps for students of Soviet Russia but not something for a casual reader to take on.