Everything Flows (New York Review Books Classics)

How hard it must be to write about what was wrong and evil with Lenin and Stalin. Where do you start? When the whole system is a lie that leaves even the believers exploited, enslaved and likely dead how do you try to sound rational in your rebuke? Vasily Grossman does it through the voices of the people caught up in the maelstrom of the USSR. The 1960 novel "Everything Flows" is so superb in putting flesh and bones to all parties that conspired to create the truly horrible dystopia and those who suffered from it. Thru imaginary but realistic first person accounts, explanations, excuses, denials and confessions he does more in 200 pages than most of the millions of pages that document the sad 20th century history of the Soviet Union. Ivan Grigoryevich is released after nearly 30 continues years in prisons and work camps. He is used largely as a straw man to draw out the thoughts and words of the characters in Grossman's 1950's Soviet Union. Stalin has died. The peak in the purging and enslavement has passed. Many political prisoners are now returning to uncertain futures after years of destitution in Siberia. Grossman uses this unique moment of slight liberation in to make the characters reflect on their own actions or observations. Thru their experiences he obliderates even the faintest illusion that life in the Soviet Union was anything but cold, hostile and insufferable. Those not broken physically or emotionally have acquiesced, collaborated, compromised or stood silent. The problem is that that no one can make sense of it all. It's too big and in 1960 it was still real and present. Grossman spends about a quarter of the book in a sidebar considering the nature of enslavement and freedom in Russia for the past 1000 years as he explains the betrayals of Stalin and particularly Lenin. While it's worthwhile and painful it is not rooted in the story which is already so good and as such it slows what is otherwise electrifying and tense. The description of the Ukraine famine of 1930 alone is worth the price of the book. This is well worth reading however in the context of when it was written and who Vasily Grossman was it's a treasure.

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

This is one of my favorite books about the soviet era. I have read both of Vasily Grossman's major works, and I felt that this one is easier to read than Life and Fate. This is actually more like an Alexandr Solzhenitsyn book.

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.

History at a Historical best !

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.

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.

EVERYTHING FLOWS is Grossman's last novel after LIFE AND FATE. Unlike that novel there is a central plot. Ivan has been released from a Soviet prison camp after 15 or 20 years.He wanders around in Moscow and Leningrad and sees family and people from the past.He eventually settles in a smaller town and gets a job.He has a relationship with his landlady and she dies.Then he goes to where he grew up - end of novel.Sounds boring - it isn't. I'd say close to half the novel is taken up by digressions. The digressions are by and large fascinating.His landlady was a minor participant in the collectivization of the Ukraine and tells a long and harrowing tale of terror.After her death , Ivan delivers his thoughts on Russia , Stalin and Lenin and it's strong stuff.In Soviet terms his comments on Lenin are pure heresy.This novel is an indictment of the Soviet Union and an effective one.Chances are you will come to this after LIFE AND FATE.This is a much shorter work and very different but the two books work well together.