Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
NYRB Classics (2009), Paperback, 272 pages
Description
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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member languagehat
This is a powerful work and as good a summary of the dark side of Russian history as I've read; in 200 pages it provides unforgettable vignettes of the various kinds of suffering imposed by the rulers of the Soviet Union, as well as sometimes lengthy historical analyses. If I encounter anyone who
However, it presents itself as a novel, and it's really not. It starts out as one, with a 50-year-old protagonist, Ivan Grigorevich, returning to Moscow from the east Siberian Gulag and meeting his well-off cousin, but it quickly becomes a series of musings by Ivan about the course of history, and for long stretches Ivan himself is forgotten and Grossman pours out his rage at what was done (tempered by his understanding of the human beings who did it) and reaffirms his belief in the ultimate value of freedom. This is not meant as a criticism, simply as a warning to anyone who might go into it expecting a traditional novel with a plot. This is not that, but it's something valuable in its own right.
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(after all this time and all the information that's come out) still doubts the horror of what Lenin and Stalin created, I will give them this book and hope they are open to what it has to say. The account of the Ukrainian famine of the early '30s, to take just one example, is crushing and convincing.However, it presents itself as a novel, and it's really not. It starts out as one, with a 50-year-old protagonist, Ivan Grigorevich, returning to Moscow from the east Siberian Gulag and meeting his well-off cousin, but it quickly becomes a series of musings by Ivan about the course of history, and for long stretches Ivan himself is forgotten and Grossman pours out his rage at what was done (tempered by his understanding of the human beings who did it) and reaffirms his belief in the ultimate value of freedom. This is not meant as a criticism, simply as a warning to anyone who might go into it expecting a traditional novel with a plot. This is not that, but it's something valuable in its own right.
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LibraryThing member tickletext
Life and Fate is Grossman's masterpiece, but Everything Flows is not far behind. Should not disappoint those who love Grossman's more famous work. Highly recommended.
LibraryThing member lriley
The plot of 'Everything Flows' Vasily Grossman's last novel centers around one Ivan Grigoryevich finally returning to the real world after 30 years in Stalin's labor camps. Stalin is dead and the thaw has begun but all the same the world he returns to is much different from the one he left. In all
He is left to think: 'Who is guilty? Who will be held responsible?' He finds a place to live in a boarding house run by an Anna Sergeyevna. Anna had been a communist part functionary in the Ukraine during the time of an enforced famine that devastated the entire region--estimated at 7 million dead from starvation. Anna tells Ivan all about it in a straightforward manner. She does not gloss over her own part in the tragedy but it is why she left her own career in the party behind. She is sick now--dying from cancer. She helps him get a job in a metal shop and they form a friendship.
Much of the rest of the book is a meditation on the past and the present. Through Ivan Grossman presents questions to the readers about the nature of those who would denounce others to save themselves and/or defend the state. As well there is a very sharply rendered analysis of Lenin's and Stalin's role in Russian history. Grossman sees them both as products of that Russian history and culture. He points out that Russia even when bent on westernization beginning with the reign of Peter the Great in the 17th and 18th centuries had its own unique ways of doing that. Whereas European societies at that time were moving towards greater freedoms for their peoples Russian society moved towards enslavement of their peasants. That time and again afterwards it continued along the same course and that the Lenin/Stalin dictatorship was only more of the same in that respect. He makes numerous other analyses of the will to power of both dictators. It strikes me that his Lenin analysis is the sharper but both gave us a lot to think about.
Kind of a novel and kind of not 'Everything Flows' is nonetheless an excellent work--insightfully covering a long range of Russian history in a relatively short space--208 pages + footnotes + some biographical information. To be honest I'm probably in the minority but I prefer it to his more famous 'Life and Fate'. I think this one in any case is more sharply focused. Anyway I'd highly recommend it.
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those intervening years his girl has left him and married another man and raised a family. Those friends and relatives who were able to remain outside did so by compromising themselves in one way or another. The person he felt closest to his first cousin Nikolay Andreyevich is among them and there is an alienation between them in the way they see the world now. Ivan Grigoryevich thinks it better to go and find his own path--one that fits his own terms.He is left to think: 'Who is guilty? Who will be held responsible?' He finds a place to live in a boarding house run by an Anna Sergeyevna. Anna had been a communist part functionary in the Ukraine during the time of an enforced famine that devastated the entire region--estimated at 7 million dead from starvation. Anna tells Ivan all about it in a straightforward manner. She does not gloss over her own part in the tragedy but it is why she left her own career in the party behind. She is sick now--dying from cancer. She helps him get a job in a metal shop and they form a friendship.
Much of the rest of the book is a meditation on the past and the present. Through Ivan Grossman presents questions to the readers about the nature of those who would denounce others to save themselves and/or defend the state. As well there is a very sharply rendered analysis of Lenin's and Stalin's role in Russian history. Grossman sees them both as products of that Russian history and culture. He points out that Russia even when bent on westernization beginning with the reign of Peter the Great in the 17th and 18th centuries had its own unique ways of doing that. Whereas European societies at that time were moving towards greater freedoms for their peoples Russian society moved towards enslavement of their peasants. That time and again afterwards it continued along the same course and that the Lenin/Stalin dictatorship was only more of the same in that respect. He makes numerous other analyses of the will to power of both dictators. It strikes me that his Lenin analysis is the sharper but both gave us a lot to think about.
Kind of a novel and kind of not 'Everything Flows' is nonetheless an excellent work--insightfully covering a long range of Russian history in a relatively short space--208 pages + footnotes + some biographical information. To be honest I'm probably in the minority but I prefer it to his more famous 'Life and Fate'. I think this one in any case is more sharply focused. Anyway I'd highly recommend it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member gbill
Vasily Grossman was working on ‘Everything Flows’ until his final days in the hospital, where he would die at just 58. Thinking that the KGB had destroyed any chance of his masterpiece ‘Life and Fate’ to ever be published, and with the constant threat of persecution hanging over him, he
The strongest chapters are on the Holodomor, the genocide of roughly five million people in Ukraine in 1932-33, that does not have the awareness it should. Grossman describes how it happened, starting with the forced relocation of masses of people to the middle of nowhere, to fend for themselves in winter, and ending with the smaller quantities of grain produced shipped off to the cities, literally starving those who had grown it. He recognizes that “it was the same as the Nazis putting Jewish children in the gas chamber”, and the irony of this genocide, as well as Soviet anti-Semitism and prison camps, given how the USSR was a powerful ally in stopping Hitler, is not lost on him. The horrifying conditions are also described on a personal level, in highly poignant scenes. “Is it really true that no one will be held to account for it all? That it will all just be forgotten without a trace?” his character wonders. Grossman is trying his very best to ensure none of the outrages in his lifetime were forgotten.
And how important is it to remember and learn from history? Attempting to force nationalism, labeling those who disagree as "enemies of the people", labeling the intelligentsia as "cosmopolitan" in a derogatory way, and inciting the hatred of minorities - in the Soviet case, fake news about Jewish doctors killing their patients, and kulaks being parasites who burned bread and murdered children - does it sound alarmingly familiar to things going on in today’s politics in the U.S. and around the world?
Another excellent chapter describes the conditions in a women’s prison camp through the experiences of a woman named Masha, who had once “read Blok, who had studied literature, who…had written poetry of her own…could also sew, make borsch, bake torte napoleon, and who had breast-fed a child.” She’s forced into sleeping with a senior guard, tries to commit suicide, and eventually resigns herself to being treated “worse than a dog” until she eventually leaves the prison in a coffin.
If the book sounds grim, well, I suppose it is, and that’s undoubtedly one of the reasons Grossman is not more highly read, and probably why I didn’t give the book a slightly higher rating.
There is such irony that a communist movement for the people, for the peasants and workers, would lead to collectivization and famine, loss of all freedoms and prison camps – and that it would be worse for peasants than it had been under the Tsars, who at least often had a heart in times of hardships. “How can we call ourselves workers if we don’t have the right to strike,” says one character. And, as men are always going to look out for themselves, it also led to far-from-socialistic corruption: “It occurred to Ivan Grigoryevich that it was perhaps not so very surprising that incorruptible asceticism, the faith of the barefoot and fanatical apostles of the commune, had led in the end to fraudsters who were ready to do anything for the sake of a good dacha, for a car of their own, for some rubles to put away in their piggy bank.”
The later chapters work well as further history lessons. For example, how the revolutionaries of the 1910’s had gotten to middle age in the 1930’s, and were then shipped off to prison camps themselves, consumed by the State they had created; the socialist element now “a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, and empty shell.” The psychology of Lenin, often portrayed for his thoughtful personal moments (including, interestingly enough, re-reading ‘War and Peace’), but ruthless to political enemies and having a paradoxical contempt for freedom. And, how Russians have never had freedom – through Tsars, communism, and now, of course, long after Grossman’s time, Putin. Grossman recognizes freedom as more important than anything else, but wonders, “When will we see the day of a free, human, Russian soul? When will this day dawn? Or will it never dawn?”
However, the most profound messages are universal. One character draws a very dark conclusion, the pessimistic view that the fundamental law of humanity over history is not one of progress and freedom, but of violence. He puts it as a law of conservation of violence, that violence is eternal, changing its shape and form, but always present. “Sometimes it is directed against colored people, sometimes against writers and artists, but, all in all, the total quantity of violence on earth remains constant,” he says. It’s incredibly sobering.
On the other hand, in what seem to be the final pages Grossman ever wrote, his character has forgiveness of those who had interrogated him, denounced him, stolen from him, and beaten him – “all of them, in their weakness, coarseness, and spite, had done evil without wanting to.” It reveals an enlightenment and a humanity that is almost unimaginable.
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courageously continued to write honest, open accounts of life in the Soviet Union. The framework for ‘Everything Flows’ is that a man returns to Moscow after spending thirty years in a gulag. There are some touching scenes as he seeks out family members who have erased him from their minds, as well as familiar places which have changed, but the real meat of the novel is not in its plot, but in Grossman’s searing political and historical commentary. There are few authors who write with such intelligence and clarity of thought. The strongest chapters are on the Holodomor, the genocide of roughly five million people in Ukraine in 1932-33, that does not have the awareness it should. Grossman describes how it happened, starting with the forced relocation of masses of people to the middle of nowhere, to fend for themselves in winter, and ending with the smaller quantities of grain produced shipped off to the cities, literally starving those who had grown it. He recognizes that “it was the same as the Nazis putting Jewish children in the gas chamber”, and the irony of this genocide, as well as Soviet anti-Semitism and prison camps, given how the USSR was a powerful ally in stopping Hitler, is not lost on him. The horrifying conditions are also described on a personal level, in highly poignant scenes. “Is it really true that no one will be held to account for it all? That it will all just be forgotten without a trace?” his character wonders. Grossman is trying his very best to ensure none of the outrages in his lifetime were forgotten.
And how important is it to remember and learn from history? Attempting to force nationalism, labeling those who disagree as "enemies of the people", labeling the intelligentsia as "cosmopolitan" in a derogatory way, and inciting the hatred of minorities - in the Soviet case, fake news about Jewish doctors killing their patients, and kulaks being parasites who burned bread and murdered children - does it sound alarmingly familiar to things going on in today’s politics in the U.S. and around the world?
Another excellent chapter describes the conditions in a women’s prison camp through the experiences of a woman named Masha, who had once “read Blok, who had studied literature, who…had written poetry of her own…could also sew, make borsch, bake torte napoleon, and who had breast-fed a child.” She’s forced into sleeping with a senior guard, tries to commit suicide, and eventually resigns herself to being treated “worse than a dog” until she eventually leaves the prison in a coffin.
If the book sounds grim, well, I suppose it is, and that’s undoubtedly one of the reasons Grossman is not more highly read, and probably why I didn’t give the book a slightly higher rating.
There is such irony that a communist movement for the people, for the peasants and workers, would lead to collectivization and famine, loss of all freedoms and prison camps – and that it would be worse for peasants than it had been under the Tsars, who at least often had a heart in times of hardships. “How can we call ourselves workers if we don’t have the right to strike,” says one character. And, as men are always going to look out for themselves, it also led to far-from-socialistic corruption: “It occurred to Ivan Grigoryevich that it was perhaps not so very surprising that incorruptible asceticism, the faith of the barefoot and fanatical apostles of the commune, had led in the end to fraudsters who were ready to do anything for the sake of a good dacha, for a car of their own, for some rubles to put away in their piggy bank.”
The later chapters work well as further history lessons. For example, how the revolutionaries of the 1910’s had gotten to middle age in the 1930’s, and were then shipped off to prison camps themselves, consumed by the State they had created; the socialist element now “a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, and empty shell.” The psychology of Lenin, often portrayed for his thoughtful personal moments (including, interestingly enough, re-reading ‘War and Peace’), but ruthless to political enemies and having a paradoxical contempt for freedom. And, how Russians have never had freedom – through Tsars, communism, and now, of course, long after Grossman’s time, Putin. Grossman recognizes freedom as more important than anything else, but wonders, “When will we see the day of a free, human, Russian soul? When will this day dawn? Or will it never dawn?”
However, the most profound messages are universal. One character draws a very dark conclusion, the pessimistic view that the fundamental law of humanity over history is not one of progress and freedom, but of violence. He puts it as a law of conservation of violence, that violence is eternal, changing its shape and form, but always present. “Sometimes it is directed against colored people, sometimes against writers and artists, but, all in all, the total quantity of violence on earth remains constant,” he says. It’s incredibly sobering.
On the other hand, in what seem to be the final pages Grossman ever wrote, his character has forgiveness of those who had interrogated him, denounced him, stolen from him, and beaten him – “all of them, in their weakness, coarseness, and spite, had done evil without wanting to.” It reveals an enlightenment and a humanity that is almost unimaginable.
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LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind
Grossman's last gasp. An epitaph, which still roundly condemns the inhumanity and evil of the Soviet system, from Lenin on.
Even here, there is one last faint glimmer of hope.
As the title indicates, the novel flows, from the train trip at the beginning, through show trials, apartment houses, and
Even here, there is one last faint glimmer of hope.
As the title indicates, the novel flows, from the train trip at the beginning, through show trials, apartment houses, and
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long lost friends. It's not bitter, and certainly not resigned. Rather, I sense a quiet determination - that this man must tell his story. That is the duty of every survivor of great evil. Show Less
LibraryThing member Quixada
Very enjoyable short novel with lots of historical facts. Now I want to read "Life and Fate".
I love this paragraph that comes near the beginning of Chapter 6:
"He visited the Hermitage - to find that it left him cold and bored. How could all those paintings have remained as beautiful as ever while
I love this paragraph that comes near the beginning of Chapter 6:
"He visited the Hermitage - to find that it left him cold and bored. How could all those paintings have remained as beautiful as ever while
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he was being transformed into an old man, an old man from the camps? Why had they not changed? Why had the faces of the marvelous Madonnas not aged? Why had their eyes not been blinded by tears? Maybe their immutability - their eternity - was not a strength but a weakness? Perhaps this was how art betrays the human beings that have engendered it?" Show Less
LibraryThing member pitjrw
Everything Flows contains the bare bones of a plot. Ivan, imprisoned in Soviet work camps for decades, returns to society to confront the confused guilty response of his remaining family, and former colleagues and friends. While this scenario yields some deftly drawn vignettes - a contentious
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dinner with a nephew and his wife, a heartrendingly short lived relationship with a widow and her son, and a final visit to Ivan's childhood home - the main thrust of the book is to provide Grossman the opportunity to ruminate on a variety of social, political,& historical aspects of the Gulag and the system that supported it. He considers the question Show Less
LibraryThing member santhony
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
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.
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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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member skippersan
You can't exactly call Vassily Grossman's Everything Flows a novel. It contains some fiction, some history, some biography, and some outraged polemic. On the novelistic side, nothing really happens to speak of. Shortly after Stalin's death, a man, Ivan Grigoryevich, returns to Moscow at the age of
So Everything Flows describes one state-sponsored atrocity after another through memories of various characters, before concluding with fifty-pages of Ivan's outraged notes about the Soviet State, Lenin, Stalin, and the Russian people's preference of slavery over freedom throughout its last millennium. In the first few chapters, Ivan's cousin, Nikolay Andreyevich, reflects on his own unquestioning, complicit role in the state's now-obvious systematic efforts to eliminate Jews from all positions of power or trust: The spreading of rumors about murderous Jewish doctors, the confessions extracted by torture, the staged demonstrations of public fury. As Nikolay recalled, "his entire life had been a single act of obedience, with not one moment of refusing to obey." Obedience had, incidentally, worked out well for him, as a scientist, when, one by one, his competitors, Jewish or otherwise, peer reviewers, and other obstacles to his career slipped quietly out of the picture.
We learn of conditions inside the gulags. We learn of the enforced famine that killed millions--yes, millions--of villagers across the Ukraine during a bumper wheat harvest in 1932-3. We learn of the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of over a million Kulaks (moderately well-off peasants) who resisted or might have resisted the collectivization of farms. We learn how the Stalinist purges rounded up first the dissenters, then their families, then those who were likely to become dissenters, and their relatives, as Stalin cast his net wider and wider. We learned how eventually the camps had become so overrun by innocents that prisoners who had actually done something became objects of intense curiosity among the other zeks and the guards.
Such outrages against human dignity could have taken place, in part, only because of their sheer inconceivability. Once the Allies had put the Nazis in their place, we reassure ourselves, that one-time aberration of Western History had gone away and could never recur. But no, Grossman's account brings home to us that the same mechanism of evil--a supremely confident authority married to a trusting populace who hesitated to ask inconvenient questions--will inevitably produce wholesale slaughter, secret genocides, the systematic extermination of a people. No one, according to Grossman, wanted to hurt anyone. No person wanted to hurt another person. But yet "the state" purged itself of the class of its enemies, like one purely abstract titan fighting off another, through historic actions of pure evil, carried out at the micro-level by good, decent people, who merely accompanied the crowd, anonymously, as obedient, innocent, individually harmless agents. When trains would pass through Ukrainian villages and filthy peasant women would hold up their dead or starving children to the passengers and plead for crumbs, who on those trains could think of themselves as a murderer just because he looked away in disgust from such ugliness? Or, better yet, what porter on a similar train, wishing only to shelter the passengers from such terrible sights, would think it genocide to simply close the window shades before the train reaches these villages? But when everyone turns away from thousands of starving villages dotted across a countryside, millions inevitably die, one human at a time.
I have very little knowledge of the history of the gulags--or for that matter of modern Russia. I've read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but beyond that, I have nothing but general background knowledge of the sort one would pick up in conversation. So I found Grossman's take on the camps and on other shameful events in the history of the early Soviet Union a much-needed lesson. This new edition, translated by Robert Chandler, contains much useful information for people like me. I found myself frequently consulting the numerous substantive footnotes, the informative glossary, and the timeline as I read. Grossman makes frequent mention of background events that he takes everyone to know about already, and in some cases, the full impact of a throwaway line didn't hit home until I had researched the reference.
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fifty from having spent the last thirty years of his life as a zek (political prisoner) in a Soviet gulag. He returns to find that much has changed. The action of the story goes no further than train rides, walks, and reminiscences, both his and those of others. But from the reminiscences emerges a horrific, previously untold history that rivals anything said of the Nazis. Those whom Ivan meets did not, with one exception, witness the gulags. Rather, the horror that haunts their lives comes from never forgetting how they had managed to keep themselves outside, holding their quasi-normal lives intact. All who had remained "free" in Soviet society had done so by denouncing friends or relatives, by acquiescing to purges, by accepting obvious lies, and by refusing to admit the price their complicity exacted from other living, bleeding, suffering humans. On every face, Ivan sees either the agony of the crucified or the guilt of a Judas. So Everything Flows describes one state-sponsored atrocity after another through memories of various characters, before concluding with fifty-pages of Ivan's outraged notes about the Soviet State, Lenin, Stalin, and the Russian people's preference of slavery over freedom throughout its last millennium. In the first few chapters, Ivan's cousin, Nikolay Andreyevich, reflects on his own unquestioning, complicit role in the state's now-obvious systematic efforts to eliminate Jews from all positions of power or trust: The spreading of rumors about murderous Jewish doctors, the confessions extracted by torture, the staged demonstrations of public fury. As Nikolay recalled, "his entire life had been a single act of obedience, with not one moment of refusing to obey." Obedience had, incidentally, worked out well for him, as a scientist, when, one by one, his competitors, Jewish or otherwise, peer reviewers, and other obstacles to his career slipped quietly out of the picture.
We learn of conditions inside the gulags. We learn of the enforced famine that killed millions--yes, millions--of villagers across the Ukraine during a bumper wheat harvest in 1932-3. We learn of the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of over a million Kulaks (moderately well-off peasants) who resisted or might have resisted the collectivization of farms. We learn how the Stalinist purges rounded up first the dissenters, then their families, then those who were likely to become dissenters, and their relatives, as Stalin cast his net wider and wider. We learned how eventually the camps had become so overrun by innocents that prisoners who had actually done something became objects of intense curiosity among the other zeks and the guards.
Such outrages against human dignity could have taken place, in part, only because of their sheer inconceivability. Once the Allies had put the Nazis in their place, we reassure ourselves, that one-time aberration of Western History had gone away and could never recur. But no, Grossman's account brings home to us that the same mechanism of evil--a supremely confident authority married to a trusting populace who hesitated to ask inconvenient questions--will inevitably produce wholesale slaughter, secret genocides, the systematic extermination of a people. No one, according to Grossman, wanted to hurt anyone. No person wanted to hurt another person. But yet "the state" purged itself of the class of its enemies, like one purely abstract titan fighting off another, through historic actions of pure evil, carried out at the micro-level by good, decent people, who merely accompanied the crowd, anonymously, as obedient, innocent, individually harmless agents. When trains would pass through Ukrainian villages and filthy peasant women would hold up their dead or starving children to the passengers and plead for crumbs, who on those trains could think of themselves as a murderer just because he looked away in disgust from such ugliness? Or, better yet, what porter on a similar train, wishing only to shelter the passengers from such terrible sights, would think it genocide to simply close the window shades before the train reaches these villages? But when everyone turns away from thousands of starving villages dotted across a countryside, millions inevitably die, one human at a time.
I have very little knowledge of the history of the gulags--or for that matter of modern Russia. I've read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but beyond that, I have nothing but general background knowledge of the sort one would pick up in conversation. So I found Grossman's take on the camps and on other shameful events in the history of the early Soviet Union a much-needed lesson. This new edition, translated by Robert Chandler, contains much useful information for people like me. I found myself frequently consulting the numerous substantive footnotes, the informative glossary, and the timeline as I read. Grossman makes frequent mention of background events that he takes everyone to know about already, and in some cases, the full impact of a throwaway line didn't hit home until I had researched the reference.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Smiley
A strange book. In parts a novel, a memior and a polemic. The book doesn't really succeed on any single level but the sheer amount of passion and raw information contained in this slim volume is to its credit.
LibraryThing member Dettingmeijer
Not evenly composed but terrifying book about Ivan Grigorjevitsj, Jewish scientist returning from the Goelag but nobody is at ease with him any more. Mixed with stories from the Goelag and essays on Stalin and the Russian soul.
Good rereading during the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, because this
Joods chemicus keert terug uit de Goelag , maar kan zijn plek - als die er al is - niet meer kan vinden.
Flarden van schijnheiligheid, herinneringen aan liefde en dood en beschouwingen over Stalin en Rusland die helaas nog steeds actueel lijken en blijken.
Good rereading during the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, because this
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place, Sint Petersberg and Siberia are important locations in writing and thinking about the (im)possibilities to remain a human being during life and even more directly after the death of Stalin.Joods chemicus keert terug uit de Goelag , maar kan zijn plek - als die er al is - niet meer kan vinden.
Flarden van schijnheiligheid, herinneringen aan liefde en dood en beschouwingen over Stalin en Rusland die helaas nog steeds actueel lijken en blijken.
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LibraryThing member kgib
I'm amazed by how well this books combines fiction, history and political writing. Pretty sure I'll never forget some parts.
LibraryThing member ParadisePorch
(Fiction, Historical, Russian, translated)
I would never have picked this up but for the War and Literature read along.
Translated from the Russian, this strongly autobiographical story follows Ivan Grigoryevich who returns to society from prison during the Communist regime. It’s hard for us to
I’m glad that I read this but it did drag immensely. Perhaps life in Russia did then.
Read this if: you want the nitty-gritty of life under Communism in post-WWII Russia. 3½ stars
I would never have picked this up but for the War and Literature read along.
Translated from the Russian, this strongly autobiographical story follows Ivan Grigoryevich who returns to society from prison during the Communist regime. It’s hard for us to
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imagine living with the distrust of friends and family members that Russian citizens did for decades—lifetimes.I’m glad that I read this but it did drag immensely. Perhaps life in Russia did then.
Read this if: you want the nitty-gritty of life under Communism in post-WWII Russia. 3½ stars
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LibraryThing member stef7sa
Although the book is unbalanced, containing not just the story of Ivan but also historical analyses of Lenin and Stalin, it still deserves five stars, if only for the horribly realistic account of the great famine, which is sure to bring you nightmares. But there is a great deal more: empathy,
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psychological insight, sharp observations. Show Less
LibraryThing member JohnJGaynard
The "hero" of this novel returns to the big cities of Russia after being freed from the Goulag in the 1950s. He makes the rounds of some of his old friends, who had all submitted to the regime, in one way or another. When they see the "hero", they feel embarrassed at the way they had behaved or
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gone along with the denunciations of friends and colleagues. The "hero" eventually finds a job working in a factory. He falls in love with a kind, simple woman, who shares with him her own shame at working with the regime and being partly responsible for the killing of the Koulaks in the Ukraine. Their joy together does not last long. The end of the novel turns into a description of the last days of Stalinism, in an attempt to understand why people participate actively in a totalitarian system, and a disquisition on the importance of freedom. Show Less
LibraryThing member Kunikov
"Everything Flows" by Grossman is hard to categorize for numerous reasons. It reads mainly as an indictment against the Soviet State, created by Lenin and warped by Stalin. It's a polemical text that goes off on numerous tangents that at their heart all lead back to Grossman's struggle in
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attempting to understand what the Soviet Union has become while at times tracing its history. Grossman seems to have a large fascination with Tolstoy. Not only is "Life and Fate" often compared to "War and Peace" but similar to Tolstoy, who has a rather large diatribe on history at the end of "War and Peace", at least half of "Everything Flows" is a similar diatribe about the Soviet Union, Lenin, Stalin, history, and freedom. It's a moving text that is very much uneven (undoubtedly due to Grossman dying before truly finishing it) but also gives a rather biased glimpse into the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, too often Soviet journalists and authors viewed themselves as amateur historians (in some cases this was a title well deserved) but their initial unearthing of original or new material and accusatory tone create a precedent that overshadows future research, allowing emotions to take the place of unbiased analysis. Grossman, like many others, bears a well deserved grudge against the Soviet Union and presents his point of view with literary flare. There's much the Soviet Union and Stalin's administration can and should be accused of, I just can't seem to be able to agree with Grossman's reasoning behind why the events he recounts occurred and how they occurred. Show Less
LibraryThing member bjbookman
Ivan Grigoryevich was released from Soviet Gulag after thirty years. Like most, he was at the wrong place at the wrong time,caught up in the dangerous political whirlwind Stalin created.
Grossman has seamlessly woven a book that is part novel, part non-fiction and part history of the purge. This is
There is an Welsh hymn that has a line 'only man is vile'. I thought of that often when I was reading.
I don't know if this novel would appeal to a lot of readers. If you are looking for a Doctor Zhivago, this isn't for you. If you have the time to spend on a book and want a cross between Solzhenitsyn and Eugenia Ginzburg, I think you would enjoy this book.
Grossman has seamlessly woven a book that is part novel, part non-fiction and part history of the purge. This is
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not a easy book to read, it requires concentration to fully appreciate what Grossman is telling us. I know I will re-read this later and will enjoy it even more.There is an Welsh hymn that has a line 'only man is vile'. I thought of that often when I was reading.
I don't know if this novel would appeal to a lot of readers. If you are looking for a Doctor Zhivago, this isn't for you. If you have the time to spend on a book and want a cross between Solzhenitsyn and Eugenia Ginzburg, I think you would enjoy this book.
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LibraryThing member john257hopper
This is a short powerful novel by the Soviet author more famous for his epic masterpiece Life and Fate set during the Second World War and the last years of Stalin. Even more than that masterpiece, this is a searing indictment of Soviet totalitarianism, and its roots in Russian history and culture.
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In many ways, it is not really a novel at all; while the characters are fictional, the situations are all too real. It is the mid 1950s and Ivan Grigoryevich returns to Moscow after 30 years in the Gulag during the mass release of prisoners in the comparatively more liberal period after Stalin's death. He is welcomed by his cousin Nikolai and the latter's wife, but they cannot understand his outlook and feelings, nor he theirs; it is though they are from different worlds. He also comes across Pinegin, who originally informed on him and who is shocked at Ivan's survival. Fleeing his cousin's flat in Moscow, he returns to his home city Leningrad and forms a brief attachment to his landlady Anna Sergeyevna, a former activist during collectivisation of agriculture in Ukraine in the early 1930s. There are some shocking passages in the book around the politically instigated famine of that time, and around the sufferings of wives of those arrested as "enemies of the people". All of this makes this book sound depressing and, of course, at many levels it is, but it also encapsulates Grossman's belief, expressed through Ivan, in the inevitable fundamental victory of human freedom. I would say that really to appreciate this book, the reader really needs a fairly detailed knowledge of Russian history and culture, and it is unlikely to appeal to the wider readership that the more narrative-driven Life and Fate does. But it is equally, though in a different way, a masterpiece of 20th century Russian and world literature. Show Less
Language
Original language
Russian
Original publication date
1970
Physical description
272 p.; 7.98 inches
ISBN
1590173287 / 9781590173282