Book description
'Everything Flows is as important a novel as anything written by
Solzhenitsyn, and Robert Chandler's superb translation makes it a
joy to read'
Antony
Beevor
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. Grossman tells the stories of those people
entwined with Ivan's fate: his cousin Nikolay, a scientist who never
let his conscience interfere with his career, Pinegin, the informer
who had Ivan sent to the camps and Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan's lover, who
tells of her involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932-3.
Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman's final testament,
written after the Soviet authorities suppressed Life and Fate.
'Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR' Martin Amis
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.
