About this ebook
Ivan Grigoryevich walks free after thirty years in the Gulag, but freedom feels as strange and fragile as captivity did.
Everything Flows follows Ivan as he returns to a country that has learned to survive through silence. Friends have compromised, neighbours have informed on each other, and even love has been shaped by fear.
Haunted by prison camps and betrayal, Ivan struggles not only to find work or shelter, but to understand how ordinary people endured, and enabled, terror.
Conversations with his cousin Nikolay and informer Pinegin force him to confront guilt, complicity and the quiet moral collapse that lingers long after the dictator’s death.
Set in the aftermath of Stalin’s regime, Everything Flows is both intimate and devastating: a reckoning with loss, responsibility, and the cost of surviving in a totalitarian state.
'Everything Flows is as important a novel as anything written by Solzhenitsyn, and Robert Chandler's superb translation makes it a joy to read' Anthony Beevor
'Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR' Martin Amis
Everything Flows follows Ivan as he returns to a country that has learned to survive through silence. Friends have compromised, neighbours have informed on each other, and even love has been shaped by fear.
Haunted by prison camps and betrayal, Ivan struggles not only to find work or shelter, but to understand how ordinary people endured, and enabled, terror.
Conversations with his cousin Nikolay and informer Pinegin force him to confront guilt, complicity and the quiet moral collapse that lingers long after the dictator’s death.
Set in the aftermath of Stalin’s regime, Everything Flows is both intimate and devastating: a reckoning with loss, responsibility, and the cost of surviving in a totalitarian state.
'Everything Flows is as important a novel as anything written by Solzhenitsyn, and Robert Chandler's superb translation makes it a joy to read' Anthony Beevor
'Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR' Martin Amis
Ratings and reviews
4.0
3 reviews
About the author
Vasily Grossman was born in 1905. In 1941 he became a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, reporting on the defence of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin and the consequences of the Holocaust, work collected in A Writer at War. Life and Fate, his masterpiece, was considered a threat to the totalitarian regime, and Grossman was told that there was no chance of it being published for another 200 years. Grossman began Everything Flows in 1955 and was still working on it during his last days in hospital in September 1964.
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