Everything Flows [Paperback]

A New York Review Books Original

Everything Flowsis 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. HereEverything Flowsattains an unbearable lucidity comparable to the last cantos of Dante’sInferno.

Interspersed with meditations on Russian history, the revolution, and the nature of violence and freedom, Everything Flows is Grossman's great moral reckoning with the crimes of Stalinism.  —Daniel Beer, The Wall Street Journal

“A half century after his death, Vasily Grossman's fiction still provides harrowing insight into the legacy of Stalinism, and the historical trauma that continues to fuel ethnic tensions within Ukraine.” —NPR Books

Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR --Martin Amis

After he submitted his masterful World War II novelLife and Fateto a publisher in 1960, the KGB confiscated the manuscript, hlăs