There is a rare and precious gift that some books possess: the ability to transcend limitations of print, locate the centre and crux of the human condition, and to carry its way powerfully into one's self. Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows [1] belongs to this class.
Written between 1955 and 1963, Everything Flows is Grossman's second and final condemnation of the Stalinist era, and a raw, powerful, poignant telling of the Soviet story. It tells of Ivan Grigoryevich, freshly released from the gulags into a world that free of Stalin and yet full of him. The book follows Grigoryevich's search for his innocent, happy, idealistic past, and his reconciliation, serene and unbitter, with the indelible changes of Stalinism. His meeting with Anna Sergeyevna, his landlady and lover, is a pivotal point of the book, and here, Grossman lays the ground for three momentous beliefs: Freedom, love, morality.
For Grossman, the simplicity of this truth is overpowering: Life is freedom. He (and it truly seems as though it is him speaking; he slips often into first person, and addresses the reader directly) sees the Soviet era as an inexorable move towards the triumph of non-freedom. From the birth of Lenin - nay, from the beginning of Russia - the foundation of the Russian state has been, to Grossman, the merciless shackling and mocking of freedom [2]. The atrocities of the Soviet state are brutal executions of freedom: the freedom to choose what to sow, what to wear and speak, where to go, who to associate with.
For both Grossman and Grigoryevich, no progress of humanity is permissible or possible in the absence of freedom. "There is", he says, "no end for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom" [3]. Freedom alone makes progress possible, [4] and it is untouched at its core by every chain and shackle [5]. Freedom is life, and life freedom. And for Grossman, the history of Russia is the history of slavery - the slavery of the masses. The ideals of Marxism that Lenin adopted and purportedly understood - the proletariat, a state for the people - was defeated by the ideal of non-freedom stamped onto the Russian psyche. Lenin destroyed the old order, and history paved the way for and chose Stalin - Stalin, who both feared and hated freedom, and therefore sought to vanish it from Russian soils and souls.
The stories of Ivan Grigoryevich and others at the labour camps in far Siberia are tributes to this. The collective farms that refused citizens the right to choose what to sow, the internal passports that dismissed their freedom of movement, literary and scholarly purges and indoctrination that mocked their freedom of thought, labour camps and mass executions that spurned their right to life - all were affronts against freedom that rested in the centre of their selves.
Through the eyes of a young mother, put away in camp for failing to denounce her husband, Grossman describes the destruction of hope. He paints hope as an irrational light - it keeps one alive and going, for the hope of a better tomorrow - and cruelly crushes it out with the hunger, forced labour and penury of the camps. For Grigoryevich, hope in the invincibility of freedom is the only thing that keeps him alive, and for his cell neighbour, hope lies murdered against a universal law that conserves and preserves violence.
The account of the Terror Famine of 1932-33 is Grossman's greatest contribution to Everything Flows. In it, Grossman bares his ideas of love, freedom and morality - and I have read nothing more raw and powerful than the simplicity of his language here. For Grossman, Anna Sergeyevna's narrative of the Terror Famine to Ivan Grigoryevich is the greatest gift of love. It is what has deeply touched her, changed her for ever, and shaped her views of the Stalinist state. In sharing the pain and the horror and the moral culpability, she gives to Grigoryevich her greatest burden, and places in him the ultimate trust of understanding [6]. Through the Famine, and the story of the four Informers, Grossman portrays the different faces of morality: one forced by the need for self-preservation, one blindly following the master, one gladly denouncing for self-gain, one indifferent to consequences. There is no moral judgment here, no good, nor bad, only a question as to the foundations for all these. All roads must lead to freedom.
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[1] Grossman was born into a Jewish family in Ukraine in 1905. After the German invasion of 1941, when his mother died (he writes elsewhere that he was unable to persuade his mother to flee Ukraine, as he did), he moved to Russia and became a war correspondent for the army newspaper Red Star. Grossman's descriptions of Nazi death camps and massacres of Jews ("The Hell of Treblinka") were used as testimony at the Nuremberg trials. His condemnation of antisemitism in Russia and public dissidence would have earned him an arrest and a harsh term at the gulags, had not Stalin died.
For a Just Cause, and its sequel Life and Fate are Grossman's accounts of the Stalinist era, and reflect his changes in perspective. Unlike the former, Life and Fate is an explosive and sharply critical account of Stalin's regime, and for this reason, suffered at the hands of the KGB before finally being published to wide acclaim. Everything Flows is his final novel, and is possibly unfinished.
[2] And that is all that Grossman compares Leninism and Stalinism (and Russian history) against: freedom. It is a heady and mindblowing comparison, for Grossman paints freedom as a simple and fundamental - the fundamental - core of the human condition, and then demonstrates how Stalin massacred it.
[3] Not merely this; Grossman's pleas for the cause of freedom are as many and emphatic as they are brief. In a pivotal passage on the value and inherence of freedom, he says, "The history of humanity is the history of human freedom. The growth of human potentiality is expressed, above all, in the growth of freedom."
[4] "Progress, in essence, is the progress of human freedom. What is life, indeed, if not freedom? The evolution of life is the evolution of freedom."
[5] "Freedom is not, as Engels claimed, the 'recognition of necessity'. Freedom is the direct opposite of necessity; freedom is necessity overcome."
[6] Grigoryevich does the same; he wishes for his lover to return, so that he may share with her "the burden, and the clarity, of his understanding. This was the consolation for his grief. This was his love."
2 comments:
I loved this post!
What made Grossman so unique, I think, was the fact that he was a moral witness to the cruelties of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes. His writing in "The Hell of Treblinka" bears a lot of similarity to his account of the Ukraine famine in Everything Flows.
Also, Grossman was, at heart, a storyteller - not unlike his inspiration, Chekhov (there's a memorable passage in Life and Fate where a character extols the virtues of Chekhov). His writing is fueled by human experience - he apparently had an endless fascination for other people and their stories, and would spend hours just talking with them, listening patiently.
Add to that the force of his own moral struggles - he was haunted for the rest of his life with the possibly avoidable loss of his mother to the Nazis and the severe disillusionment the once-staunch communist in him faced when witnessing the brutality and anti-semitism of Stalin - and you have a truly powerful author. I've never read anybody who writes with such feeling, and such compassion.
Although Grossman does not hesitate to record the depths to which we can sink, he never revels in it, but always quietly suggests the possibility of hope. As long as there humanity (fascism, for him, reduced men to nothing more than mindless machines), there will be the yearning for freedom, he seems to suggests. And as long as we yearn for freedom, there is always hope.
*suggest (2nd last line). :)
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