The Original Manuscript of Forever Flowing: Grossman's Autopsy of the New Soviet Man

Vasily Grossman and the myths of the Great Patriotic War

“…Chandler has argued that, but for ‘Grossman’s persistent moral questioning and his heretical equation’ of communism and fascism, ‘ Life and Fate would have come oddly close to meeting the authorities’ repeated demand for a truly Soviet epic’ (Grossman, 2006: xv). Indeed, one post-Soviet Russian critic declared that ‘stylistically speaking, Life and Fate is a completely Soviet book’ (Garrard, 1994: 286), just as some Russian readers of 1970s samizdat versions apparently regarded Grossman as ‘too close to the system he was trying to debunk’ (Zinik, 2011).…”

“…Robert Chandler, similarly, has written of Grossman as someone who ‘retained at least some degree of revolutionary romanticism until his last days’ (Grossman, 2010b: 8). True, Everything Flows contained a bitter critique of the whole communist experiment, a critique that Grossman sharpened in later drafts written after the seizure of Life and Fate (Garrard, 1994). But in a slightly earlier piece, ‘Eternal rest’, he offers an elegiac lament for the halcyon days of the early Soviet Union (roughly between 1917 and 1934) when the revolutionary intelligentsia flourished and the utopian ideals of humanity and freedom had not yet congealed.…”

Testimony on the margins: Silence, innocence and the other in Vasilii Grossman’s late fiction

“…It is generally accepted that the novella is unfinished, and that the author would have made further changes and additions had he lived longer. While speculation on the nature of those possible revisions takes us unhelpfully into the area of authorial intention, John Garrard’s examination (1994: 275) of the so-called Zabolotskaia manuscript show us that many of the later insertions were the polemical passages addressing Soviet history and Lenin’s legacy. Some of these sections are weakly integrated (Garrard 1994: 276), but there are clear, if slightly clumsy, attempts to indicate that they originate in Ivan’s thoughts, as in the case of Mashenka’s story.…”

“…While speculation on the nature of those possible revisions takes us unhelpfully into the area of authorial intention, John Garrard’s examination (1994: 275) of the so-called Zabolotskaia manuscript show us that many of the later insertions were the polemical passages addressing Soviet history and Lenin’s legacy. Some of these sections are weakly integrated (Garrard 1994: 276), but there are clear, if slightly clumsy, attempts to indicate that they originate in Ivan’s thoughts, as in the case of Mashenka’s story. In particular, the reflections on Lenin begin, ‘Now and again Ivan Grigoryevich wrote down his thoughts in a school exercise book left behind by Alyosha’ (Grossman, 1994: 352; 2009: 165); this long section ends, ‘It did not surprise Ivan Grigoryevich that the word “freedom” had been on his lips when he was sent to Siberia as a young student, and that this word was still alive in him, still present in his mind, even today’ (1994: 373; 2009: 200).…”