Everything Flows
Vasily Grossman author Robert Chandler translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:5th May '11
Should be back in stock very soon
Translated into English for the first time, this is a fearless epic from one of the great writers of the twentieth century
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.
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
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 *
Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR * Martin Amis *
Possibly the greatest chronicler of the second world war * Guardian *
Only Dante, in his account of Ugolino and his sons starving to death in a locked tower, has written of death from hunger with equal power -- Robert Chandler * London Review of Books *
Supplies a wealth of information about the social context and Soviet terminology -- Christopher Taylor * Guardian *
Beautiful and philosophical narrative of lives and lamentation... a thoughtful polemic * Irish Times *
This is a genuinely visionary work of art, and a worthy sequel to Grossman's magnum opus Life and Fate -- Chandrahas Choudury * Daily Telegraph *
This is a story that needs to be heard -- Simon Humphreys * Mail on Sunday *
This tremendous book has the power to make you weep at man's inhumanity to man and, at the same time, rejoice that freedom does not die. Thanks to Robert Chandler and his co-translators, Elizabeth Chandler and Anna Aslanyan, the Russian voice positively sings. -- Lucy Popescu * Independent *
A powerful work...It shows us the perplexity of an old man coming home after 30 years in a gulag to find society much changed and is the work of a true visionary. * Daily Telegraph, Christmas round up *
ISBN: 9780099519164
Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 25mm
Weight: 280g
320 pages