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Everything Flows

Everything Flows

Summary

'Everything Flows is as important a novel as anything written by Solzhenitsyn, and Robert Chandler's superb translation makes it a joy to read'
Antony Beevor

Ivan Grigoryevich has been in the Gulag for thirty years. Released after Stalin's death, he finds that the years of terror have imposed a collective moral slavery. He must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. Grossman tells the stories of those people entwined with Ivan's fate: his cousin Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, Pinegin, the informer who had Ivan sent to the camps and Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan's lover, who tells of her involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932-3.

Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman's final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed Life and Fate.

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

Reviews

  • As eloquent a memorial to the anonymous little man in the Stalinist state as Dr Zhivago is to the artistic spirit in post-Czarist Russia and The First Circle to the scientific intelligentsia
    New York Times

About the author

Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941, he became a war reporter for the Red Army newspaper Red Star and came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of the novel being published for another 200 years. Grossman died in 1964.
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