Russian journalist and novelist, Vasily Grossman, is the most humanist of writers. I found my way to him through his brilliant epic of WWII, Life and Fate. I didn’t want my conversation with him to end, so I continued on to the novel, Everything Flows. The first work was confiscated by the KGB in 1961, and the latter was unfinished in 1969 when he died. Neither saw print until 1989.
What I love most about Grossman’s writing is the way he forces you to see behind numbing statistics through his humane, angry, “realist” eye. Jailers and prisoners, killers and victims, husbands and wives, mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, hacks, lovers, informers, generals and infantry grunts, each one is rendered at the micro level of a fully realized human being.
Everything Flows goes further. The author enters into the work: not through veiled autobiography, and not in post-modern fashion, writing himself in as a character. The boundary between Grossman and his protagonist melts as language takes on the passion of a writer at the end of his life interrogating history. As in the great Russian literary tradition, historical and literary figures have living currency. He calls them to account. The work has a raw, unedited feel, but you forgive the authorial breach because the polemic is so compelling. Everything Flows raises questions that haunt me. They should haunt you.
It begins in the “thaw” after Stalin’s death when some political prisoners are released from the Gulags. Ivan Grigoryevich, freed after thirty years, is returning to a world that has moved on. Part Rip Van Winkle, part Soviet Prince Mishkin, his return discomforts the privileged and complacent–his cousin, Nikolay, whose stalled scientific career received a boost when more talented colleagues were targeted in Stalin’s post-war purge of “cosmopolitans;” the acquaintance from student days whose secret denunciation doomed Ivan to a life as “labor camp dust.” Grossman exposes the perverse incentives that tie professional survival to soul-destroying collaboration. In a sequence worthy of Bulgakov, a typology of informers are placed on mock trial, all of them “full of merits and good qualities,” the defense argues. “Dark saturnine forces pushed them. They were subjected to billion-ton pressures–and no one among the living is innocent…” You, reader, are not innocent.
Ivan falls in love with a war widow, Anna Sergeyevna, who, like him, struggles against memory: “a piece of iron in my heart, like a shell fragment.” During forced collectivization, she witnessed the dispossession and demonization of the whole peasant class, the mobilization of Party activists: “their eyes were like glass; they were like the eyes of cats,” and the famine as every house was searched, every grain of wheat taken away. Was it Stalin who signed the decree? she wonders. Here, Grossman unmasks the chilling template: mass murder as means to an end; the creation of fanatics, opportunists, and passive by-standers.
Ivan learns that the new Russia operates on bribes and influence, “incorruptible asceticism, the faith of the barefoot and fanatical apostles of the commune, had led in the end to fraudsters who were ready to do anything for the sake of a good dacha.” And the creation turned on the creators. Why the purges of 1937? “The State had no need of holy apostles…it needed employees.” The origin of this man-eating machine? Ivan/Grossman conjures up not Stalin, but the iconic Lenin: “Insane political ambition together with an old jacket, a glass of weak tea, a student garret.” Lenin’s combination of non-freedom and socialism “stupefied the world more than the discovery of nuclear energy.” Written from inside the belly of the beast, Grossman has the courage to describe a terrible mimicry between fascism and Soviet state socialism. For this, even in the West, the old and new left (in this I include myself) would have relegated him to the heretic’s dustbin back in the day.
At the lyrical end of Everything Flows, Ivan journeys alone to his childhood home; the train goes along the sea: “the eternity of its freedom seemed…to be akin to indifference. The sea had not cared about Ivan Grigoryevich when he was living beyond the Arctic Circle… The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom.” But this flowing likeness fills him with happiness. Like everyone else, no matter what they have done or had done to them, he has remained simply human and has the possibility of freedom.
I do not know if I agree with Grossman, but I am moved by the generosity of his vision. In North America, we cannot claim an innocent history, and freedom takes on idiosyncratic North American meanings. The freedom of which Grossman writes seems necessary as air to live. Finally, I wept, both for Ivan and for Grossman.
