Everything Flows
-
- €3.99
-
- €3.99
Publisher Description
Ivan Grigoryevich walks free after thirty years in the Gulag, but freedom feels as strange and fragile as captivity did.
Everything Flows follows Ivan as he returns to a country that has learned to survive through silence. Friends have compromised, neighbours have informed on each other, and even love has been shaped by fear.
Haunted by prison camps and betrayal, Ivan struggles not only to find work or shelter, but to understand how ordinary people endured, and enabled, terror.
Conversations with his cousin Nikolay and informer Pinegin force him to confront guilt, complicity and the quiet moral collapse that lingers long after the dictator’s death.
Set in the aftermath of Stalin’s regime, Everything Flows is both intimate and devastating: a reckoning with loss, responsibility, and the cost of surviving in a totalitarian state.
'Everything Flows is as important a novel as anything written by Solzhenitsyn, and Robert Chandler's superb translation makes it a joy to read' Anthony Beevor
'Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR' Martin Amis
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Few novels confront human suffering on as massive a scale as this one. After his release into post-Stalinist Russia, Ivan Grigoryevich finds that the 30 years he spent in Stalin's forced labor camps have wreaked terrible changes in himself and in Soviet society. He goes first to his cousin's Moscow apartment, but he and his wife are preoccupied with petty successes secured by cooperation with a state-sanctioned campaign of anti-Semitism. Ivan then travels to Leningrad, where he finds work in a metal shop and rents a room from a widow who falls in love with him and shares stories from her past (most notably the forced collectivization of Ukrainian farms), providing a counterbalance to Ivan's experiences in Siberia. Suffering is everywhere, but Grossman finds no glory or redemption in it, and just when you think things can't get bleaker, he offers up a new vignette that sinks deeper into misery, though there is a glimmer of hope toward the end. The prose is rough in spots, but Grossman's individual by individual portrayal of anguish gives readers a heartrending glimpse of the incomprehensible.
