Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman

How do you write about a book such as Everything Flows? 

It is about a man named Ivan Grigoryevich, who after Stalin’s death is released after nearly 30 years in the gulag. It is part fiction, part journalism, and part polemic. It is Vasily Grossman’s final testament after the Soviet authorities “arrested” his masterpiece Life and Fate, and a much angrier book. 

But don’t think the writing is dull and dry. There are plenty of great passages, as one finds in Life and Fate: 

“He had slipped away, out of people’s minds, out of cold hearts and warm hearts alike. He existed in secret, finding it ever harder to appear in the memories of those who had known him.

Time worked unhurriedly, conscientiously. First the man was expelled from life, to reside instead in people’s memories. Then he lost his right to residence in people’s memories, sinking down into their subconscious minds and jumping out at someone only occasionally, like a jack-in-the-box, frightening them with the unexpectedness of his sudden, momentary appearances.” (Ch.3) 

(translated by Robert Chandler) 

This is Ivan Grigoryevich thinking about his childhood, thinking about an area once occupied by the Circassians and now left to rot after they’re gone: 

“Here in the forest lay sullen, soot-blackened stones that were the remains of ruined hearths; in abandoned cemeteries were dark headstones that had already half sunk into the ground.

Everything inanimate—stones, iron—was being swallowed by the earth, dissolving into it with the years, while green, vegetable life, in contrast, was bursting up from the earth. The boy found the silence over the cold hearths especially painful.” (Ch.5) 

Ivan Grigoryevich wanders around Leningrad, looking at the changes and thinking about the past, and visits the Hermitage: 

“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 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? How come their eyes had 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?” (Ch.6)

The writing, as you can see, isn’t dry. 

In Everything Flows, Vasily Grossman writes about the gulag, the Soviet system, the Holodomor (the famine caused by the Soviet government that killed millions of Ukrainians); he writes about tyranny, moral compromise, and guilt; he also dissects Lenin, Stalin, Russian history, and “Russian national character”. Some people may complain that it’s an unbalanced book, but it feels like a book that the author had to write—it takes such a form because the author had to write down the story and his ideas, his thoughts in such a way.

And it’s a book that stays with you. The chapters about the women’s camp and about the Holodomor are some of the most powerful and haunting chapters I have ever read. 

Here’s a sample:

““… As for the children—did you see the newspaper photographs of children from the German camps? They looked just the same: heads heavy as cannonballs; thin little necks, like the necks of storks; and on their arms and legs you could see every little bone. Every single little bone moving under their skin, and the joints between them. And draped over their skeletons was a kind of yellow gauze. And the children’s faces looked old and tormented—it was as if they’d been on this earth for seventy years. By the spring they no longer had faces at all. Some had the heads of birds, with a little beak; some had the heads of frogs, with thin wide lips; some looked like little gudgeons, with wide-open mouths. Nonhuman faces. And their eyes! Dear God! Comrade Stalin, by God, did you see those eyes?”” (Ch.14) 

But Everything Flows isn’t just a document from a journalist—Vasily Grossman is a novelist—he imagines what it feels like for a woman in a camp as she finally realises she will never see her husband and daughter again, or for a woman who has believed in the system but now sees people in Ukraine left to starve to death simply because they didn’t fulfil the quota dictated by the government. 

It is a very good book, a book I think everyone should read, especially now with the Ukraine war going on.