Everything Flows

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.

"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" New York Times "Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR" Martin Amis "Possibly the greatest chronicler of the second world war" Guardian "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" -- Robert Chandler London Review of Books "Supplies a wealth of information about the social context and Soviet terminology" -- Christopher Taylor Guardian