Everything Flows

Name: Everything Flows
Author: Vasily Grossman
ISBN: 9074373194

by Vasily Grossman

“A lot can be forgiven anyone who, in the filth and stench of camp violence, remains a human being,” Vasily Grossman’s protagonist, Ivan, tells us. This unfinished novel by the Soviet Jewish writer pulls us into the Stalinist Terror. When, after Stalin’s death, Ivan returns from many years in the gulag, he meets Anna, a middle-aged woman who in the 1930s worked as a Communist Party bookkeeper in Ukraine. During one long night, Anna tells Ivan the story of the famine in Ukraine: grotesquely emaciated girls and boys, starving peasants feeding on cats and dogs, parents eating their own children, the howling. “‘Who’s going to hear them?’ I’d think,” Anna tells Ivan, ‘There is no God.’” “‘Ukraine’ means borderlands” Everything Flows takes us through the Stalinist experience in a very condensed but pointed way. It takes us through the story of the famine in Ukraine, and there’s no way to understand Ukraine without understanding the horror of that famine. I got involved in Eastern Europe because I was at an impressionable age in 1989. I was caught up in the drama of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolutions, the breakup of the Soviet Union. I was the last generation raised during the Cold War. I grew up with a Reagan Era vision of the world as two camps divided by an Iron Curtain. All of that unraveled just as I was coming into political consciousness. Greetings from Novorossiya by Paweł Pieniążek! This book came out a couple of months ago in English translation.

Recommended by

Marci Shore

"“A lot can be forgiven anyone who, in the filth and stench of camp violence, remains a human being,” Vasily Grossman’s protagonist, Ivan, tells us. This unfinished novel by the Soviet Jewish writer pulls us into the Stalinist Terror. When, after Stalin’s death, Ivan returns from many years in the gulag, he meets Anna, a middle-aged woman who in the 1930s worked as a Communist Party bookkeeper in Ukraine. During one long night, Anna tells Ivan the story of the famine in Ukraine: grotesquely emaciated girls and boys, starving peasants feeding on cats and dogs, parents eating their own children, the howling. “‘Who’s going to hear them?’ I’d think,” Anna tells Ivan, ‘There is no God.’” “‘Ukraine’ means borderlands” Everything Flows takes us through the Stalinist experience in a very condensed but pointed way. It takes us through the story of the famine in Ukraine, and there’s no way to understand Ukraine without understanding the horror of that famine. I got involved in Eastern Europe because I was at an impressionable age in 1989. I was caught up in the drama of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolutions, the breakup of the Soviet Union. I was the last generation raised during the Cold War. I grew up with a Reagan Era vision of the world as two camps divided by an Iron Curtain. All of that unraveled just as I was coming into political consciousness. Greetings from Novorossiya by Paweł Pieniążek! This book came out a couple of months ago in English translation."

Ukraine · fivebooks.com