EVERYTHING FLOWS

'Everything Flows' is the last novel by Vasily Grossman, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his extraordinary epic of besieged Stalingrad, and the besieged modern soul, Life and Fate. The central story is simple yet moving: Ivan Grigoryevich, the hero, is released after thirty years in the Soviet camps and has to struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. This story, however, provides only the bare bones of a work written with prophetic urgency and in the shadow of death. Interspersing Ivan’s story with a variety of other stories and essays and even a miniature play, Grossman writes boldly and uncompromisingly about Russian history and the 'Russian soul', about Lenin and Stalin, about Moscow prisons in 1937, and about the fate of women in the Gulag, and in the play he subtly dramatizes the pressures that force people to compromise with an evil regime. His chapter about the least-known act of genocide of the last century - the Terror Famine that led to the deaths of around five million Ukrainian peasants in 1932-33 - is unbearably lucid, comparable in its power only to the last cantos of Dante’s Inferno. In this last book, Grossman is a man set free - from the silence imposed on him by Soviet censors, from the conventions of fiction. The result is a novel like no other, a testament of unequaled conviction to the horrors of oppression and the relation of liberty.