A New York Review Books Original
Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman's final testament, written after
the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The
main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps,
Ivan Grigoryevich 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. 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 got
Ivan sent to the camps. Then a brilliant short play interrupts the
narrative: a series of informers steps forward, each making excuses for
the inexcusable things that he did--inexcusable and yet, the informers
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 about her eager involvement as an activist in the
Terror famine of 1932-33, which led to the deaths of three to five
million Ukrainian peasants. Here Everything Flows attains an
unbearable lucidity comparable to the last cantos of Dante's Inferno.