- Person
- Vasily Grossman
- Lived
- 1905–1964
- Field
- Novelist & war correspondent
- From
- Soviet
The story
In 1960 Vasily Grossman submitted his great novel Life and Fate for publication, and soon afterwards the KGB seized every copy it could find. Rather than fall silent, Grossman turned to a shorter and even more outspoken book. He worked on Everything Flows until his death from cancer in 1964, writing with no realistic hope of seeing it published in his own country.
The novel follows Ivan Grigoryevich, who is released after thirty years in the Soviet camps and must find his place in a world that has moved on without him. Around him Grossman sets his cousin Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience get in the way of his career, and Pinegin, the informer who had Ivan sent away. A short play interrupts the story, in which a series of informers step forward to excuse what they did. Throughout, Grossman reflects on Russian history, the revolution and the nature of violence and freedom.
At the heart of the book is the story of Ivan's lover, Anna Sergeyevna, who recalls her eager work as a Party activist during the terror famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine, the Holodomor, which killed millions of peasants. Grossman was unsparing about the policies behind it. He wrote that the decree on grain procurement required that the peasants of Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to death by starvation, along with their little children.
Everything Flows circulated in samizdat and appeared in English as Forever Flowing in 1972, but it could not be published in the Soviet Union until 1989, a quarter of a century after Grossman's death. A new English translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Anna Aslanyan followed in 2009.
Wikipedia notes that the novel is especially admired for its quiet, unforced and yet horrifying condemnation of the Soviet state, a work in which Grossman, freed from worry about the censors, wrote honestly about Soviet history. Reviewers have called it his great moral reckoning with Stalinism, and its publisher has compared the clarity of the famine chapters to the last cantos of Dante's Inferno.
Why it matters
Everything Flows preserved the memory of the Holodomor's victims and challenged official silence about one of the Soviet era's great crimes.
About Vasily Grossman
Red Army correspondent who wrote one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp, then the novel Life and Fate, so dangerous to the Soviet state that the KGB “arrested” the manuscript.
More about Vasily Grossman
- Vasily Grossman reported from the front for over 1,000 daysRejected for combat, Vasily Grossman became a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and spent more than 1,000 days at the front, from Moscow and Stalingrad to Berlin.
- Vasily Grossman helped compile The Black BookWith Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman helped compile The Black Book, a documentary record of the Nazi murder of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.
- Vasily Grossman asked Khrushchev for 'freedom for my book'After the KGB confiscated Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman wrote to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, insisting he was 'requesting freedom for my book'.
- Friends saved Vasily Grossman's 'arrested' Life and FateAfter the KGB seized Life and Fate, copies kept by friends survived. Andrei Sakharov photographed pages and Vladimir Voinovich smuggled the film abroad; it was published in 1980.
- Vasily Grossman wrote one of the first death-camp reportsVasily Grossman's 1944 essay 'The Hell of Treblinka' was among the first accounts of a Nazi death camp and was used as prosecution evidence at the Nuremberg trials.
- Vasily Grossman's brave letter freed his wife in the TerrorIn 1937 Vasily Grossman became guardian of his wife Olga's two sons and wrote to NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov on her behalf. A friend called it great bravery. Olga was released.
Sources
- Vasily Grossman Wikipedia
- Everything Flows New York Review Books
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.