Forever Flowing

"Forever Flowing , one of his late works and one of my favourites, is a short novel of which we have two English translations, Whitney’s and Chandler’s – both very different in their flavour and in what they emphasize. It’s the story of a Gulag victim’s return into the mainstream, and his realisation of being utterly out of place. He has moved so far along in his intellectual and ethical development that trying to adjust to Soviet life during the [post-Stalin] Thaw is of no interest to him. One of the narratives in Forever Flowing – the section dealing with the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s, during the collectivisation of agriculture – is just incredible in how Grossman was able to get inside the head of the characters. That story is just bloodstopping in its power. I wish I could think of a non-Jewish writer who would write of the Jews with such power and great empathy as Grossman, a Jew, wrote about the non-Jews, Ukrainians in this case. It’s a story that is really without any parallel. Grossman, having concluded Life and Fate , was hoping to have it published in the Soviet Union, rather than attempting to send it abroad clandestinely, as dissident writers would do in the decades to come. But the KGB seized most of the manuscripts, and Grossman was told by Mikhail Suslov – the party’s Central Committee’s secretary for ideology – that his novel would never be published, that it was more anti-Soviet than Doctor Zhivago . Of course, Suslov was correct in a morbidly ironic way. How Grossman ever thought this book would be published in the Soviet Union is to me a paradox which attests either to his naivety or to his saintliness – or both. Grossman’s latter years were disastrous. He had a hard time making a living. He told a writer friend that “they” had “strangled him in the back-alley.” “They” refers to the Soviet establishment but also the Soviet literary brethren who betrayed him – to the whole system. He died of cancer in 1964, surrounded by a tiny circle of dedicated family and friends. So it’s a very sad story, which has a happy afterlife. Grossman has survived very well in translation – as opposed to such Jewish bicultural literary geniuses as Isaac Babel, who are generally very hard to translate into English, just as Bernard Malamud would be hard to translate into Russian. I think his enduring legacy is of a once passionate advocate of the Soviet system who began with the belief that all people are beholden to the revolution, and who was then transformed by the war and the Shoah into a writer of Promethean vision with a mission to bear witness to what he was seeing – and a political philosopher to rival the other political philosophers of his time. I think that’s a powerful legacy. Maxim D. Shrayer’s answers copyright 2013 © by Maxim D Shrayer"