EVERYTHING FLOWS BY VASILY GROSSMAN

It was with trepidation that I picked this up. As I wrote in my review, Vasily Grossman’s Life & Fate is the only book I have ever snapped shut, not out of boredom or irritation or a desire to read something else, but out of fear, a fear of what I would be exposed to and how it would affect me. More than once – as I carried it around with me during the day, fitting in a few pages here and there – I made a fool of myself in public, especially at work, during breaks, sitting there damp about the eyes, with a pained expression on my face, and a lower lip starting to tremble. I had visions, as I came to read Everything Flows, of being solemnly escorted out of the building, a broken man, my head resting on the ample bosom of a stout motherly woman…’what’s wrong with him?’ my colleagues will ask her. ‘I have no idea! He was just reading a book.’

As one would expect of a book that only just breaches 200 pages, Everything Flows is much narrower in focus [in terms of its basic storyline], and less epic and panoramic, than Grossman’s masterpiece; it was, moreover, unfinished at the time of the author’s death, which perhaps accounts for how episodic it is. The man tying these episodes together is Ivan Grigoryevich, who has just been released from prison [after a total of 29 years] following the death of Joseph Stalin. The passing of Uncle Joe is significant, because it led to the overturning of many unsound convictions – including, in this instance, Ivan’s – and this, this acceptance by the State that people had been locked up, and murdered, on trumped up charges, meant that ordinary Russians had some uncomfortable truths to confront, not only about how their government had behaved but in terms of their own guilt or culpability also.

“The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom…How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness.”

What is most striking about Ivan is that, although he is so central to the plot, he is, as a character, almost non-existent. He is described as a once sensitive, timid and shy child, and, despite his experiences in labour camps, he has maintained a reserved bearing, calmness and politeness, so much so that other characters think him odd, or naïve, or simply stupid. Much like Prince Myshkin, in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, it is through this meek man, through their interactions with him, that others reveal their baser tendencies, or weaknesses or flaws. Take his cousin, Nikolay, a scientist who Ivan first visits upon his release. Nikolay has a guilty conscience, for he had not been denounced or arrested; he had, in fact, prospered under Stalin. He could not be said to have been entirely in favour of what went down, in fact he was much troubled by what happened to Jews and other prominent intellectuals, but he didn’t openly oppose it either; he didn’t speak out when they were relieved of their posts, when they were ostracised, etc.

[Workers in a Soviet Gulag]

Throughout the opening stages of the book Grossman explores complicity in its different forms. He suggests that Nikolay was complicit in his inaction, in his reluctance to question the Party line, but most of all in his attempts to justify himself, or lie to himself, in order to have some peace of mind. It is a familiar story that those caught up in such large-scale abuses of power find it difficult to believe, or accept, what is actually happening; they doubt what they see or make excuses for it, because the truth is so awful, and, if accepted, the truth of things – that entirely innocent people are being systematically brutalised and murdered – necessitates action – because only a bad person could do nothing in the face of such horror – which is the last thing that most people want; they do not want to have to fight or oppose.

If challenged, those guilty of the complicity of inaction are likely to argue that they are but one man, so what can or could they do or have done? They also abdicate responsibility to the State or to authority. ‘It was not I, it was them; I trusted them to do the right thing…and so when they told me that such-and-such was guilty of a crime I believed them.’ I see this kind of passivity, this passing on of responsibility in the face of disgraceful authoritarian action, this moral weakness, all the time. How many times have you heard the phrase ‘there’s no smoke without fire’ applied to criminal cases? The idea is that if someone is accused of something there must be a reason for it, even if we cannot see it ourselves. It isn’t that people really believe the State is infallible, it is simply that it is easier to think so, to tell yourself so.

“The criminals had, after all, confessed during the trials[…]they had been questioned in public by a man with a university degree[…]there had been no doubt about their guilt, not a shadow of a doubt.”

After leaving Nikolay’s house, Ivan crosses paths with Pinegin, who is the man responsible for denouncing him. Pinegin worries that Ivan knows that it was him, but assures himself that he is imagining it. Here the emphasis is not on what people will allow to happen, what they passively sanction, but what ordinary human beings are actually capable of. I wrote in my review of Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen that we comfort ourselves with the thought that we would never actively participate in mass oppression but normal people did and do. Grossman explores in detail why that is the case. Why do ordinary people condemn or murder for their governments? Are they evil? No, unfortunately not. Evil as a concept is, I’m afraid, simply another comfort blanket.

Some participate in order to get ahead, in order to prosper. If you help to oppress another group, not only can you take what is theirs, but there is less competition for what is not, for jobs, etc. There is also the pleasant feeling of being useful to the State, of being valued by the State. People like to be praised, they like to think that they are important or necessary. In Russia at the time, people wanted to serve Stalin, they admired him, loved him even. In terms of Pinegin, he denounced Ivan not because he hated him, but because that is what the State asked of him; he was, Grossman suggests, simply following orders or doing his duty. It isn’t, one could argue, for the common man to make these kinds of decisions, about what is right and wrong and fair or unfair, that is the responsibility of the State.* For me, there is an interesting subtext to all this, which is that morality is changeable, is malleable, and so if a State or an authority decide that someone is guilty, then they become guilty. It does not matter if another authority would declare them innocent. Therefore, those who participated in the functioning and application of that authority were also innocent, were in fact in the right, because they were behaving in accordance with the laws, rules and culture of their society.

Most of what I have discussed so far is found in the first fifty or so pages. For me, this was the strongest section of the book. Beyond those first fifty pages the storyline disappears somewhat, and Ivan gets lost among a series of [admittedly, very engaging] essays, ranging from the nature of freedom and hope, to collectivisation and a number of chapters dedicated to understanding Lenin and his role in what followed him. Therefore, as a novel, as a work of fiction, Everything Flows is a bit of a mess, is, in all honesty, not successful at all. Life & Fate also includes philosophical essays but they ride alongside a well-crafted narrative, are fully integrated into the text. This is not, however, too serious a criticism, especially when one remembers that the book was unfinished at the time of Grossman’s death; one assumes that, if he had had more time, he might have developed Ivan’s story so that it would not simply trail-off.

More of an issue is that Grossman’s treatment of the Russian peasantry and the oppressed is romanticised, so that it has almost a propagandistic flavour; indeed, I felt as though I, as the reader, was being manipulated somewhat. For example, during the chapter on collectivisation – which is, I might add, possibly the most harrowing and upsetting thing I have ever read – Grossman writes about one mother reading fairy-tales to her starving, dying children in an effort to distract them from their pain. All the oppressed people throughout the book are so lovingly described, they are all so gentle, so noble, so kind and patient and forbearing in their suffering that it just does not ring true. They are, like Ivan, like Prince Myshkin, christ-like, they are representations of The Russian Soul. For the record, I want to point out that my sympathy is entirely with them, with the ill-treated, with the genuine, real victims of Stalinism; in fact, there is a certain level of guilt accompanying my words here, but I am trying to approach the book as literature; and, as such, Everything Flows is a failure. But, then, I guess that a believable, successful novel was never really Grossman’s aim; what he wanted to do was try to understand what had happened to his beautiful country, his beautiful people, and so one can overlook, even admire, a touch of sentimentality.

♥

For a book that had such a powerful emotional and intellectual hold on me, I do not want to end on a criticism. I said to someone the other day that Vasily Grossman had a simple, direct way of getting to the heart of everything, that I find very moving. And on that note I’ll finish up with something from the text, something simple and direct, and pretty fucking devastating…

*these arguments, where it appears as though one is trying to absolve those who participate in tyrannical regimes, are Grossman’s not mine.

RED CAVALRY BY ISAAC BABEL

It took me quite a long time to realise that I’m a bit odd. Seriously, for ages I thought I was perfectly normal. Then, a minor epiphany. I was in my room with this girl, who just wanted to get it on, had been impatiently waiting, I later learned, to get in on with me for a couple of hours, and I was rambling on about some Hungarian novel I was reading and trying to convince her of how great the production on Cam’ron’s Oh Boy is when she said to me: ‘you’re really eccentric.’ ‘Bollocks I am,’ I replied. She looked at me affectionately, but with a disbelieving smirk. ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’ she asked. ‘Sure, why not,’ I said. And we did get it on in the end. But by being the first person ever to say it to my face it brought home to me that, while I’m so wrapped up in myself and my peculiar preoccupations, my behaviour might strike other people as unusual. Like the time I let a spider live in my room because when I went to kill it it appeared to flinch.; or when I decided to walk home from another town, a journey that took me roughly 5 hours, in the wind and rain, because I didn’t want to wait ten minutes for the next bus. Anyway, most of the time I am just that, just eccentric, but sometimes it morphs into something more heavy duty.

All this is a way of working up to a confession that I’ve been feeling pretty weird lately. Not depressed, just kind of disconnected. It’s as though no one can touch me, nothing can draw a genuine reaction from me; I feel as though I am living behind glass. Everything becomes difficult at these times, everything becomes a chore, even the briefest interaction [although I’m good at faking, at being able to cover my tracks]. This isn’t a new state of affairs; I periodically have these episodes. It’ll pass; it always does. I mention it because my response to this, my second reading of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories, was, in a sense, inauthentic; and that bothers me. That’s not to say that Red Cavalry isn’t a moving reading experience. It is. As acknowledged, I’ve read it before and it damn near killed me on that occasion. But I do wonder if perhaps my choosing to read it again now was a cynical tactic to try and shock myself out of my current mood. I don’t like that; I am aware of my guilt in using these terrible events, whether fictional or not, as a kind of electric shock therapy.

I feel like the best, most honest, thing I can do, then, is to write about my first reading. I can vividly recall my response to the opening story in this collection when I started it a couple of years ago. My initial reaction was a kind of relief, and excitement. I knew immediately that Babel was a great writer. It was one image, the description of the sun as like a severed head that did it. That still gives me a literary hard-on. However, that admiration soon turned to apprehension as I reached the end of the short tale. A description of the details of this story, in anything other than Babel’s words, would, I think, fall short. But, to avoid quoting large sections of the text [and these stories are, on average, only a couple of pages in length anyway], I’ll say briefly that it involves a man bunking down in a room with a few others. During the night he is woken by a woman, who tells him that he has been kicking her dad in his sleep. Her dad, it turns out, is dead; has been hacked to pieces. It’s the fact that the girl is so concerned about her dead father, about the sanctity of his body, that slays you. He is the best father in the world, where would I find another father like this, she says. Jesus Christ. And you might be shouting at the screen right now: stop spoiling it, you prick. But I don’t need to worry about spoilers, in this instance, because these stories don’t rely on twists and turns; indeed, there’s a horrible inevitability to them, a brutal matter-of-factness [despite the superior prose].

[Red Cavalry by Kazimir Malévichy – 1930]

I intended, when I came to write a review of this, to spend some time discussing Lenin, the Cossacks, the Reds and the Whites, but I’ve realised that none of that stuff is necessary. For those that are interested in that kind of thing, Isaac Babel was present during the conflicts he writes about [he was a commander in Semyon Budyonny’s 1st Cavalry Army], and the people who pass through and the incidents [in the broadest sense] he describes or namechecks are real. Yet, to make a big deal of that side of things means one is in danger of giving the impression that these stories will only appeal to a small readership – Russian historians, or whatever – and that is not the case. There’s a universality on display here. This could be any war, really; any battle. And the miserable nature of war, the awful ways that people are capable of behaving towards each other are not specific to any time or era or particular incident. I say awful things, by the way, because there is very little to cheer you up here, there really isn’t any positivity. In, say, War & Peace there are those moments, those moments of camaraderie for example, that might warm your heart. You’ll be looking for a long time if you try finding those in Red Cavalry.

I’ve mentioned in other reviews that generally speaking I find short stories unsatisfactory. Babel, to a large extent, side-steps those aspects of short stories that I struggle with. These stories work as snapshots, as parts of a broader picture. It’s like someone taking a huge painting and cutting it up into smaller pieces, and showing them to you piece by piece, thereby drawing your eye to the little details you might have missed. I liked that. It appeals to me far more than 20-30 stories that are all about completely different things, themes, events shoved together in one volume.  There is some continuity of characters too; and that helps to unify the work.

I want to touch on one last thing before I finish. My review of Babel’s Collected Stories is one line, this one:

‘Prose to die for. Literally.’

That strikes me as just shitty sloganeering now, but what I meant by it is Isaac Babel, who did not, or would not, write about the events he witnessed in such a way as to glorify the Russian people and the Russian government, who would not always uncritically toe the party line, was eventually arrested, tortured and killed by his own people [I read somewhere that it was actually due to his having an affair with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, but that seems odd to me]. According to Nathalie Babel Brown:

“…his trial took place on January 26, 1940, in one of Lavrenti Beria’s private chambers. It lasted about twenty minutes. The sentence had been prepared in advance and without ambiguity: death by firing squad, to be carried out immediately. Babel had been convicted of ‘active participation in an anti-Soviet Trotskyite organization,’ and of ‘being a member of a terrorist conspiracy, as well as spying for the French and Austrian governments.’ Babel’s last recorded words in the proceedings were, ‘I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others… I am asking for only one thing — let me finish my work.’ He was shot the next day and his body was thrown into a communal grave.”

I guess that puts things in perspective.