Download Todo Fluye Depicted By Vasily Grossman Released As Text

a way this little book is a short version of the giant sitelinkLife and Fate, In it Grossman also describes the cruelties of stalinism, illustrated by the return of an old man afteryears in the detention camps.
We see how his friends and family react uncomfortably, because all of them somehow were responsible for his detention, and have complied with the totalitarian regime.
Grossman depicts this psychological process in a very refined way,

But he goes further: in the end the story changes into a real pamphlet, an ode to freedom as the driving force of history, and how freedom was systematically raped in Russian history, especially in the SovietUnion.
Grossman not only writes about the cruelties of Stalin, but remarkably also stresses the perfidity of Lenin, No wonder this book was only published years after the death of the author in, Sometimes the story is a bit pushy, but it is a real jewel, It read like a series of essays with the central character Ivan Grigoryevich now released afteryears in prisons/Siberia for a crime he did not commit.
There is some musings from Ivan on the meaning of freedom, There are some musings from informers who survived by naming others as enemies of the State, There is a bleak and harrowing chapter on the Ukrainian famine of thes, Then there are chapters as Grossman tries to understand what happened during the Stalin years,
It's an impressive book, As a blowthedoorsoff journalistic expose of Stalinist genocide, purges, “Everything Flows” is a masterpieces the courageousness of which is matched only the the quality of verbal expression Grossman was, in fact, a Soviet War Correspondent in WWII.
Neither this work nor his larger “Life and Fate” were published during his lifetime and Im amazed that Grossman had the gut to even submit this material to Soviet authorities for approval.
Considering it was only less than a decade since Stalins death, Grossman probably should have been thankful the government just said “No fuing Way!” and didnt separate his head from the rest of him.


Thats the good news,

The bad news is that as a work of literature as opposed to journalism, this is about as close to a zero as I can recall having seen.
Grossman starts out by introducing some characters and the notion of a story line a guy returns form ayear exile and meets his cousin, who was able to rise far above his professional talents because everyone better than hi was purged, and then later meets the guy who denounced him.
But the fictional elements are drawn weakly at best and by the middle of the work, he had pretty much abandoned any pretense of writing a novel: Eeven a supposed love interest introduced in the second half was done only to allow Grossman to put a long chapter detailing the destruction of the kulaks and the governmentinduced famine into the voice of someone other than the author after she delivers that narration, all thats left for the character is to get lung cancer and then die.
I get that the work is unfinished, But even had Grossman lived longer and been able to polish it more, I dont see it as going in a direction that would change this assessment.


As a novel, I dont see enough here to merit even one star, So the question is how to rate it for the journalistic work it is, If I could go backyeast or so, Id have no problem giving itstars, But this isand given that its being disseminated the NY Books publication isand discussed today, I think its fair to wonder how much of what it says can reach from the earlys to today and possibly beyond.
I think thats more than zero, but not nearly enough for me to join in the multitude ofandstar reviews.
Grossman is big on “whowhatwherewhen,” but to transcend his own time, I believe he also needed to address “why,” and that is something he completely omitted.
Given that I already learned about the Stalin era and the absence of anything relating to “why” or any other new insight, I could have just as easily not read this.
Ideale prosecuzione di Vita e destino, questo romanzo ne è anche la logica conseguenza, Se Vita e destino, infatti, era ambientato in pieno stalinismo, Tutto scorre, . . prende avvio dopo la morte di Stalin, e fa i conti con tutto quello che lo stalinismo è stato, dai gulag alla collettivizzazione forzata, dal Terrore del 'all'attacco postbellico contro il cosmopolitismo.
Il ritorno dal gulag di Ivan Grigor'evič, infatti, costringe lui stesso e i personaggi che gli si muovono attorno a riflettere su quello che è stato.


Grandioso Grossman, che fugge la tentazione di semplificare, mostrando invece quanto i fenomeni postrivoluzionari debbano essere guardati con gli occhiali della complessità: lo si vede soprattutto nella parte finale del romanzo, che tende a diventare quasi un trattato di storia sovietica in cui Grossman spiega con incredibile lucidità scrive tra ile il! le dinamiche del leninismo prima e dello stalinismo poi.
È una spiegazione che si trasforma in un inno alla libertà, parola ripetuta innumerevoli volte nei capitoli finali:

La storia dell'umanità è la storia della sua libertà.
La crescita della potenza dell'uomo si esprime innanzitutto nella crescita della libertà, La libertà non è la necessità diventata coscienza, come pensava Engels, La libertà è diametralmente opposta alla necessità, la libertà è la necessità superata, Il progresso è essenzialmente progresso della libertà umana, Giacché la vita stessa è libertà, l'evoluzione della vita è evoluzione della libertà, o ancora La nonlibertà trionfava incontrastata dall'Oceano Pacifico al Mar Nero, Essa era ovunque e in ogni cosa, E ovunque e in ogni cosa la libertà è stata uccisa, Fu un'offensiva vittoriosa che fu possibile attuare solo versando molto sangue: ché la libertà è vita, e sconfiggendo la libertà Stalin uccideva la vita.
, tanto per fare un paio di esempi,

Strazianti le pagine sulla collettivizzazione in Ucraina, L'ho già detto parlando di Vita e destino, ma mi ripeto: Grossman è un uomo che non teme la verità, anche quando è complessa o difficile da affrontare.
Dopo anni di arresti arbitrari e timore di essere denunciati, in questo libro si considerano con grande cautela perfino le azioni dei delatori,

dei “quattro Giuda” così facili da condannare.
È una lucidità, quella di , che non porta né al cinismo né all'esasperazione della razionalità, Porta, invece, a una certezza: “tutto ciò che è disumano è assurdo e inutile”, E porta anche a una speranza, che va nutrita ancora oggi: un giorno “la libertà sarà tutt'uno con la Russia”.


Sono ancora una volta grata a Vasilij Grossman, uomo e scrittore di grande coraggio, che in tempi difficili ha predicato la libertà, condizione essenziale perché l'esistenza umana sia davvero vita.
"Not under foreign skies, Nor under foreign wings protected
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
"
Anna Akhmatova's Requiem

If Life and Fate New York Books Classics may rightfully be seen as Vasily Grossman's masterpiece, his Everything Flows may rightfully be seen as his testament, a requiem if you will not only for his own life but for the lives of those who lived in his time and place.


"Everything Flows" tells a simple, yet emotionally deep and politically nuanced tale, The story begins with thereturn to Moscow of Ivan Grigoryevich afteryears of forced labor in the Gulag,marked the year, following Khrushchev's denunciation of the excesses of Stalin, in which the tide of prisoners returning from the Gulag reached its peak.
He arrives at the Moscow flat of his cousin Nikolay, Nikolay, a scientist with less than stellar skills, has reached some measure of success at the laboratory through dint of being a survivor.
The meeting in the flat is entirely unsatisfactory for both parties, Grossman paints a vivid picture of Nikolay, more than a bit jealous that Ivan's light had always shone brighter than his own prior to Ivan's arrest.
Nikolay suffers from the guilt of one who was not arrested and who is painfully aware of the choices he made to keep from being arrested.
It seems clear that Ivan represents a mirror into which Nikolay can see only his own hollow reflection,

Ivan leaves Moscow for his old city of Leningrad, the place where he was first arrested in, By chance, he runs into the person, Pinegin, whose denunciation placed him in jail in the first place, Once again, Ivan is a mirror and Pinegin is horrified at what he is faced with, what he has buried for thirty years.
Ironically, and to great effect, we see Pinegin's horror recede once he settles down to a sumptuous lunch at a restaurant reserved for foreigners and party officials.
Ivan does not know about the denunciation and Grossman here embarks on a discourse on the different types and forms of denunciation available to the Soviet citizen.
It is a remarkable discourse that shows how many different ways there are to participate in a purge and how many ways there are to legitimize ones participation and/or acquiescence.


From Leningrad Ivan travels to a southern industrial city where he finds work and eventually finds a deep and satisfying love in the person of his landlady Anna.
The centerpiece of that relationship is the brutal honesty involved Anna spends a night detailing her role in the pointless, needless famine that swept the Ukraine in.
It is an account made even more chilling by the straightforward, confessional nature of its telling, But it is also redemptive and shines a light on what might be called Grossman's vision that love and freedom are two goals, not mutually exclusive, that an honest accounting of our lives forms the essence of our shared humanity.


The above summary does not do justice to the power of Grossman's prose or to the literary and political importance of the work.
Since the death of Stalin, the Soviet line had remained relatively firm Stalin's excesses were the product of a disturbed mind that represented a horrible deviation from the theory and principles of Leninism.
The USSR's best path was the one that returned it to the path created by Lenin, Khrushchev first enunciated this line, Even Gorbachev's perestroika was based on the theory that a return to firstprinciples, i, e. Leninism, would save the USSR from destruction,

Grossman, prophetically, did not buy into this line and Everything Flows'last chapters are notable for a remarkable attack not only on Stalin but on Lenin and Lenin's antidemocratic tendencies that had more in common with Ivan the Terrible than the principles of revolutionary democracy.
"All the triumphs of Party and State were bound up with the name of Lenin, But all the cruelty inflicted on the nation also lay tragically on Lenin's shoulders, " Grossman may have been the first to make this leap and he paid the price for making that leap, This involves the suppression of his Life amp Fate and Everything Flows, Grossman's explicit claim that Stalin was not a deviationist from Leninism but its naturalborn progeny was profoundly subversive and there is no doubt in my mind that it was this difference that explains why, under Khruschev's 'thaw', that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was publishe while Life and Fate and Everything Flows was banned.


Despite the horrors set out, quietly and without excess rhetoric, Grossman returns to a somewhat optimistic vision of mans search for freedom: "No matter how mighty the empire, all this is only mist and fog and, as such, will be blown away.
Only one true force remains only one true force continues to evolve and live and this force is liberty, To a man, to live means to be free, "

Robert Chandler's translation of Everything Flows is exquisite, He brings the same clarity and emotional investment in Grossman's work that he brought to his prizewinning translations of Platonov and Hamid Ismailov's The Railway.
In short, Everything Flows is a treasure and I cannot recommend this book highly enough, .