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NYRB Classics
May 2010
On Sale: May 5, 2010
272 pages
ISBN: 1590173287
EAN: 9781590173282
Kindle: B003K15IE4
Paperback / e-Book
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Fiction
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.
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