Everything Flows

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was born in Berdychiv. He graduated from Moscow University in 1929. In the 1930s he joined the VKP(b). He wrote on historical-revolutionary and industrial themes. During the war years he was a correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda. A prosperous conformist during his lifetime, he left behind two time bombs: the novella "Everything Flows" (1955–63) and the novel "Life and Fate" (1948–1960). The manuscripts of "Everything Flows" and the novel "For a Just Cause" were confiscated by the KGB during a search of Grossman's home, and as a result the authentic text of these works has apparently not reached us. "Everything Flows" was published by Possev in 1970, after which it circulated in Samizdat; and in its homeland — only in 1989 in the journal Oktyabr, no. 6. The novella of barely 80 pages was preceded by a philosophical-sociological commentary entitled "Lenin and Stalin" of 30 pages, in which one G. Vodolazov makes an unsuccessful attempt to separate the two subjects of his article and, having whitewashed the first, to lay all the crimes of real socialism on the second.