FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Everything FlowsBy Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Anna Aslanyan Harvill Secker, 290pp. £16.99
A MAN MAKES his way slowly back to Moscow. The train journey has taken days. But no, it has taken years; decades of suffering. His mind is heavy with memories, and his eyes, watching the scene ever changing from the carriage window, are weary from the array of images as the rain rushes past “brick factories and little village houses built from logs, past tin-grey fields of cabbages, past station platforms where the night rain seemed to have created grey puddles of asphalt”. The train journey has taken a lifetime because the man in the carriage has just completed a 30-year sentence spent in labour camps. But now Stalin has died and everything has changed.
Vasily Grossman (1905-1964), witness and visionary, author of Life and Fate,a 20th-century War and Peace, was working on Everything Flows, this strange, bizarrely beautiful and philosophical narrative of lives and lamentation, when he died in a hospital bed. Conceived as a novel, and presented as one, it is more of a meditative, moving love song for a battered nation. It is a thoughtful polemic and also a chant shaped by grief. Russia emerges as a tragic hero, a victim, defeated by the Party, defeated by history, defeated by its sheer, unrelenting size. Above all, though, there is the guilt: too many had to live and die with the burden of a guilt too immense to understand. Grossman looks at the guilt haunting survivors who got by either denouncing others or saying nothing.
The characters are individuals but they are also representatives. Grossman’s love of his country is shaped by exasperation. This is an angry book; its irony stings. “Stalin’s death was not part of any plan: he died without instruction from any higher authority. Stalin died without receiving personal instruction from Comrade Stalin himself. In the freedom and capriciousness of death there was something explosive, something hostile to the innermost essence of the Soviet State. Confusion seized minds and hearts.”
This confusion reveals much a great deal about the profound damage done to the communal Russian mind, a mind distorted by fear. “Stalin had died! Some were overcome by grief . . . Many people taking part in the official mourning assemblies in institutions and factories were overcome by hysteria: women cried and sobbed as if out of their minds . . . Others were overcome by joy. Villages that had been groaning beneath the iron weight of Stalin’s hand breathed a sigh of relief. And the many millions confined in the camps rejoiced.” The news is passed on, whispered by tens of thousands of prisoners, picking up snatches of information in the camps. Grossman evokes scenes of prisoners, gleeful but wary, suspicious that it is only a rumour, nothing more. “In this death lay an element of sudden and truly spontaneous freedom that was infinitely alien to the nature of the Stalinist State.”
Russia was tormented by the war with Germany, yet it was equally devastated by the many wars it fought against its own people, starving them, oppressing them. Initially it seems that this is going to be the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, an Everyman haunted by his experiences. He attempts to revisit his earlier life as a way of understanding what has become his history. “Did all this really happen to me? Has this been my journey, my fate? It was with those transports that my road began. And now it has reached its end.”
Grigoryevich is almost a hero, and his survival causes others, such as his cousin Nikolay Andreyevich, to feel uneasy about the relative comfort in which he has lived while Ivan was in the Gulag. But there is no true comfort; everyone awaits the knock on the door that could destroy them. Grigoryevich attempts to make sense of his memories and in doing so defines the Russian dilemma. “His journey through the camps was now over and it was time to see clearly, time to discern the laws of this chaos of suffering where guilt was juxtaposed with holy innocence, where false confessions to crimes lived alongside fanatical loyalty to the Party, where senseless absurdity – the murder of millions of innocent and loyal people – masqueraded as cast-iron logic.”
His story is only a part of it; this is Russia's story as Grossman attempts to make sense of it all. In this, he is closer to Chekhov than he is to Tolstoy; Everything Flowstriumphs on the particular rather than the panoramic. It is the small detail, the story of a woman who had lived a comfortable Moscow life only to have it snatched from her, leaving her to wonder what happened to her small daughter. Everyone is expected to denounce at random; women are expected to denounce their husbands. There is no room for loyalty – expect of course, to the Party.
There are scenes of camp life, reminiscent to those evoked by Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich(1962). In one scene female prisoners weep on overhearing the music made by off-duty soldiers. Elsewhere the book, which moves through the thoughts of so many and no one in particular, considers the communal guilt: "Who is guilty? Who will be held responsible? This question needs thought. We must not answer too quickly. Here they all are: lying expert reports from engineers and literary critics: speeches denouncing enemies of the people; intimate conversations and confessions made to a friend – transformed into the reports and denunciations of informers and stoolies."
What makes one man denounce another? He makes a pen portrait of a “someone quite ordinary. He drank tea, ate fried eggs, visited the Moscow Arts Theatre, liked to talk to his friends about books he had read. Sometimes he was kind and generous. He was, admittedly, nervous, high-strung; he had no self-confidence”.
Beaten and threatened, this ordinary man does the unthinkable: he slanders an innocent man. But the innocent man is not arrested; his accuser is; it is he who does 12 years’ forced labour. This is a book of multiple ironies, the tone well rendered by the translators; Grossman ponders these ironies. Most of all, he considers the enigma of Lenin, the man and the monster, a monster who had betrayed his many virtues. “In order to understand Lenin, we have to do more than examine his qualities as a politician or the qualities he showed in everyday life. We have to correlate Lenin’s character first with the supposed national character of the Russian people.”
The anger, rage and eloquence of this powerful address to his country culminate in his love for that tragic homeland. But in order to fully grasp this book it is vital to read Life and Fate, with its many dramatic set pieces. That book has its own saga: on its completion, in 1960, it was confiscated by the KGB, and remained unpublished until a smuggled version appeared in the West in 1980. It was Grossman, haunted by his own guilt, who said: "Chekhov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness." Grossman compounds this; he also continues a majestic and bleak story begun by earlier great Russian writers in the 19th century and continued through the social and political upheaval that followed the death of the tsardom as Russia endured a century of fear. His vision is epic because the story he has to tell is that and more. Literature and music resound with an element identified as the Russian soul, a miracle existing somewhere between hope and despair. Grossman expresses its essence time and again in this persuasive elegy, not quite novel, not quite polemic.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Timesand author of Second Readings; From Beckett to Black Beauty, published by Liberties Press
