Everything Flows

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.

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

Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR

Possibly the greatest chronicler of the second world war

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

Supplies a wealth of information about the social context and Soviet terminology

Beautiful and philosophical narrative of lives and lamentation... a thoughtful polemic

This is a genuinely visionary work of art, and a worthy sequel to Grossman's magnum opus Life and Fate

This is a story that needs to be heard

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.

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.

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.