Grossman’s novel Everything Flows depicts the life
of Ivan Grigoryevich who spent thirty
years in a concentration camp. After his release, he tries to meet his old
friends and love who have drifted far by that time. While recounting his story he also shows how treachery has caused people betray others,
terror eliminated many people in 1930’s. the novel also shows the historical
account of Russia and the State has jettisoned Lenin’s legacy and gave way to
dictatorship of one individual Stalin. The famine in Ukraine caused by forced
collectivization led to the endless sufferings in the name of deportation of
kulaks, starvation and millions of deaths. Ivan finds it hard to pick up the
pieces of his life shattered beyond repair and finally dies. The novel is an
indictment of man made disaster and the collapse of utopian hopes nurtured on
the foundation of revolution. This also explains historical antagonism between
Ukrainians who welcomed fascists and
Russian antagonism to the collaborationists . This enmity buried deep down has
led to the desire for independence of
Ukraine the recent war between Putin’s
Russia.
When Ivan’s
cousin Nikolay Andreyevich receives the telegram he expresses resentment
towards his wife’s petty thoughts about party. Nikolay also is apprehensive
about losing his chance of getting elected to
the Academy of Sciences. His wife Maria Pavlovna is also worried and
regrets that Ivan has not seen their child Valya who is no more . this sets the
tone to the message felt by Ivan in the train at the end of the journey that life continues despite the absence of
oneself.
Nikolay suffers from lack of
sufficient recognition. He keeps quiet
in the face of rising antisemitism and punishment of his colleagues for
disobedience to party or independence of mind. He supports the State’s
vindictive action against the Jewish doctors accused of plot , tortured to get
confessions and punished and when later the State recants , Nikolay feels
regret. He becomes the director of his lab on his being White Russian. His colleagues
Mandelstam and former director Ryskov was dismissed from his position. Grossman
ironically relates of Nikolay’s absolute obedience, careful behavior not to
lose his prospects and suppression of his skepticism regarding nature of
Socialism in the wake of millions of
starvation deaths in Ukraine due
to collectivization. The death of Stalin brought some relief in the stifling
atmosphere and guilt in Nikolay. He began thinking of the innocence of Bukharin
and others who died in show trials. Contrary to the compromising nature of
Nikolay who shunned any communication with his cousin , we find Ivan who has
remained independent , defiant and faced expulsion from university, exile and later camp
life for thirty years who was forced to experience eternal oblivion with gradual erasure of even his memory from the minds of his friends and his love Anna
Zamkovskaya.
Grossman writes how individuals
have been suspicious, careful with people around them in making any
remarks and more concerned about saving
their skin. He brings out the sudden death of Stalin in contrast with orchestrated
public life and events earlier and the State that liberates people from the ‘chimera
of conscience‘ by admitting its guilt in persecuting the innocent .
When Ivan meets Nikolay , the
latter tries to portray how hard his life has been in the regime. He and his
wife pretend that they are all for the comfortable stay of Ivan with them and tried to bring him up to date. But Ivan
refuses to stay with them as he sees through the hypocrisy of their lives.
In his wandering Ivan finds that
city Leningrad has changed totally. The
city which took the shape according to the status of the onlooker . it appears
differently to an invalid, prisoner, a young man and a prisoner from camp. The statue of
bronze horseman Tsar reminds him “the majestic power of a wondrous State
‘ which had grown and grown to “control both the vastness of the space and the
secret depths of the hearts of enchanted human beings “ who surrendered their
freedom and will of freedom to the State. (58)When he meets Pinegin who has denounced him and wronged him , the
latter feels guilty but Ivan wishes him good luck and goes away.
Grossman shows the profile of an informer- one does it but gets punished
, another does it for rising in hierarchy, the third who denounces
veterans does in the faithful service of party, the fourth
for material gain and out of spite. He
mentions the mass submission to the
State and guilt of the living and right to judge reserved only for the dead.
The fault lies with State or the human nature. Here Grossman analyses what has
made even the virtuous people and highly educated to succumb to the pressure of
the State. He says that all are guilty, the defendant, prosecutor and even the
writer. Pinegin who has wronged Ivan goes to a restaurant , eats and
drinks and forgets the person whom he
has wronged. Ivan becomes a metal worker
, resides with Anya Sergeyevna who has her own history of guilt for her part in
forcible collectivization in which she
has had to punish the poor for hiding grain or doing sundry jobs for survival. After
listening to her Ivan shows his concept of freedom includes not merely freedom
of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of
conscience “as the right to live
and work as you wish and not as you are ordered to.” (89) and laments , “But these days there’s no
freedom for anyone- whether you write books, whether you sow grain or whether
you make boots.” (89) This shows the negative feature of planned economy which
compels people to put up with lack of occupational freedom. Why has State turned so heartless and
mechanical to compel people to give up freedom for the sake of bare survival without it ?
Ivan ruminates that realist
literature romanticized everything and a lot of talented people faced
persecution or extinction. “What he observed now was the same pitiful weakness,
the same cruelty, the same greed and the same terror that he had seen in the
camps.” (93)He finds that those arrested
for genuine opposition wanted all arrested on fictitious charges to be releases
whereas the latter thought differently. The total submission made people to
believe in infallibility of the party and the State despite wring done to them
individually. People out of camps are mentally imprisoned. The free old people
adjusted to the present times and people’s desperate struggles to earn extra
rubles , “the struggle for the right to make boots, to knit a cardigan, to sow
what one wants to sow- all this was a manifestation of man’s natural and
indestructible aspiration towards freedom.” (98) Ivan
wants to “ discern the laws of 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.”
(101)
Ivan Grigoryevich remembers the
story of Maria Konstantinivna called
Masha who has become a camp
prisoner for refusing to denounce her husband . She is separated from her
husband and daughter Yulia and
transported to Siberia. She suffers from harsh physical labour, sexual
exploitation by a senior guard Semisotov
, loses her sense of identity as a refined and educated woman, observes
the domination and physical l abuse of
criminal women over other women and the
stubbornness of old revolutionary women imprisoned since Lenin’s time . When
she listens to a dance music she weeps.
She realizes that her child has become an orphan and her husband has been shot
and she would never reunite with her family. Her hope of liberation dies forever and she too perishes with a look
of joy on listening t music and realization of hope vanished . Ivan reflects
that “in the labour camps of Kolyma , men were not equal to women. Men really ,
had it easier.”(122)
She shows ,ore concern for Ivan
who has suffered a lot. She tells how
during collectivization kulaks were destroyed . Their grain was confiscated,
starved and forced to denounce friends and
family members. Grossman shows how the destruction of entire class has
led to dehumanization and killing of humanness. She tells him that the
executioner who treats his victim as less the human ceases to be a human being whereas the victim remains a
human being despite how the executioner
kills him. The kulaks were deported , the grain was confiscated, people were
starved , the party committees and the security agencies took the initiative. “The State is
everything, and people are nothing”.
(135) what results was , “the silence of the
grave. No footsteps but the foot steps of famine-famine never slept.’(138) the
people became beggars and the part officials stopped coming and the villages
were exhausted and common people were reduced to begging. The villages
became denuded of any amenities and
people were prevented form leaving for cities. The city people had something to
eat but the villagers had nothing . it
was akin to the killing of the of jews
in gas chambers. The mothers struggles and escaped to neighbours houses to not
to listen to the cries of children. All available animals such as dogs and cats were slaughtered for food. Children became
malnourished and deformed. Even birds and leaves were consumed. Grossman writes
that how could this be allowed by Stalin who allowed whole villages to die of
hunger and people. In Kiev the queues of
the hungry and emaciated grew and many were people without internal
passports or civil rights. The
starvation and the crawling of the hungry towards Kiev and survival of very few reminds one of Bengal famine in
India that killed more than three
millions during the early 1940s. Grossman refers to cannibalism grown out of
hunger and how all such people were killed . He wonders if Gorky knew it or
kept silent . the sorrow of Ukraine has been
described most vividly in the novel . All this narration of tragedy and
the cruelty of the State is though the
character of Anna Sergeyevna.
Vasily and Ganna are meek and
timid who speak in low voice , do the work on fields when sent by brigade
leader though it was not their turn. They feel happy over small pleasures of
life such as eatables for wife and embroidered shirt. Their child Grisha hardly
weeps even though urged by his mother to do so. The family faced starvation
deaths without questioning State and Stalin. They were mere statistics to the
brigade leader. Corruption has enveloped al officials – factory director, the chief of police, the First secretary, the
investigator, the Stockroom boss . the people merely were amused when the case against
the stock room boss fell through. Ivan meets a doctor and comes to know that
Anna Sergeyevna has got lung cancer. While she joined a hospital, her child
Alyosha was taken away by her sister to
live with her. Ivan , grief-stricken at his
helplessness to alleviate her suffering begins ruminating his camp life and awaiting the return of Anna mutual sharing of burden and love.
Ivan thinks of his camp life in Lubyanka and
in Butyrka, the stifling bed boards, the exhausting interrogations of the
prisoners, the punishment of different sections of participants in earlier
phases of revolution , the fanatical
haters of the past, the first builders of new world built a State that treated
them as expendable for the sake of vast constructions for building socialism in
one country.
Grossman tells the story of
Mekler who had a burning passion in him for revolution and behaved ascetically . he denounces his father
, does not rescue his brother-in-law and paid for his mother’s funeral without telling Party and thinks it as a
stain. He compares the absolute and dog-like devotion of Mekler, the old
Bolshevik who remained although he was
incarcerated and perished.
The generation of the Civil war
was finished at the altar of the State, the new God. It caused the Red terror
of 1919, dispensed with democratic freedoms, undertaken collectivization and
sent people to camps and exile and resettled minority nationalities and
communities such as Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens , Volga Germans
, Russified Bulgarians and Greeks. The national element replaced the core of socialism
and manifested human freedom as
indispensable. The bureaucracy has swallowed the core principle of power
to the people.
In his assessment of Leninist
State, the novelist writes as follows: “ the history of the Russian State did
not choose the human and humane sides of the Lenin’s character but cast them aside as unwanted rubbish.” (179) His “fanatical faith in the omnipotence e of the surgeon’s knife” , contempt for freedom ,
implacable cruelty characterized him.
Grossman sees him neither deifies nor demonizes him but understands him as a
complicated and tragic figure, kind in
private sphere but brutal in the public sphere.
Grosman gives his assessment of Lenin and Stalin in his novel. He explains that
the asceticism, faith and receptivity to the West and universal sympathy makes him “akin to Pushkin and to Peter the
great”(187) He says that Russia has been enslaves for a millennium , the slave
girl has chosen Lenin to lead her. He sees
an abyss separating the essence of Russian life from that of Western life and
this gulf between freedom and nonfreedom widened. After the rule of Peter the great and Caterine, Lenin preserved
the link between progress and nonfreedom. His “synthesis of freedom and
socialism stupefied the world more than the discovery of nuclear energy.” (196)
Grossman regrets that Russia has preceded the Western countries in revolution
and spawned national socialism in Italy and Germany. This is a clear misunderstanding
of genesis of national socialism. He understands Russian soul having faith and
lack of faith, love of humanity and reckless violence, philistinism and
industriousness, bravery and lack of human dignity. So, he attributes the later
course of Russian hi story to Lenin who manifested Russian soul and proved a link
between progress and nonfreedom. Stalin by executing Lenin’s closest friends
and comrades such as Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Rykov, Zinoviev killed the essence
of Leninism but also affirmed Leni and Leninism by strengthening State .IN Stalin
was “embodied a statehood that was both Russian and Soviet”. He constructed the
“State without freedom.” (207) and this
at the cost of society . Both Stalin and State proved complementary to each
other. Everything became a mockery, parliament, elections, trade unions, social
life, collective farm administration , party at different levels. Stalin ‘s repressive
State has put on the face of Revolution. The State has entered third state and nonfreedom
persists but freedom is not far. Ivan thinks, “To a man, to live means to be
free. Np, not everything that is real is rational. Everything inhuman is senseless
and useless.” ( 216) while ivan thinks that the present age shows
the supreme violence of State against
the individual and in this lies our strength and weakness, his cell mate
Aleksey Samoilovich says, “violence is eternal, no matter what is done to
destroy it.” (219) and continues “What
history of humanity can there be if man’s goodness always stands still?’(220)
Ivan Grigoryevich ’s waiting for
the return Anna Sergeyevna Proved futile and he had to accompany her to the
cemetery and later handed over her belongings to her sister in the village. He goes
to the seaside town where his father’s house stood and sees nature as
indifferent to an individual’s fate, all those who caused him suffering did so
for their own survival , they didn’t know his fate but being humans kept freedom in their souls alive. “He had
achieved nothing. He would leave behind him no books, no paintings , no
discoveries .he had created no school of thought, no political party and he had
no disciples.” (224) He stood unchanged before a house non-existent .
Grossman’s moving novel shows eternal hope in the transient lives of humans through understanding the
cruelty of Power and frailty of humans. It tells the
meaning of humanity in an apparently indifferent nature and history.
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