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Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century

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Stalingrad, 1942

Since Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was first published, posthumously, in 1980, it has earned praise as one of the most significant books of our time. Leon Aron called it “the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century.” Linda Grant wrote in The Guardian that it was the only book that ever changed her worldview: “It took me three weeks to read it and three weeks to recover from the experience, during which time I could barely breathe.”

What makes this book so remarkable? Modeled on Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace , Life and Fate recounts the adventures of soldiers and civilians during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. 1 Focusing on the Battle of Stalingrad, it also depicts Russian POW s in a Nazi death camp, a group of Jews on their way to the gas chamber, Nazi officers defending their ideology, and Soviet commissars defending theirs. Like War and Peace , Life and Fate centers on a single family, in this case the Shaposhnikovs. The family matriarch, Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova, sets the moral tone for her numerous children and grandchildren. For her, basic decency and family loyalty matter more than ideology. A Jewish physicist, Viktor Shtrum, married to Alexandra Vladimirovna’s daughter Lyudmila, struggles to solve the mysteries of the atomic nucleus without violating Marxist-Leninist metaphysics and while attempting to justify his compromises with the regime. His brother-in-law Nikolai Krymov, formerly married to Lyudmila’s sister Yevgenia, exemplifies the dedicated Bolshevik. Unflinchingly devoted to an ideology demanding mass killing, he himself is eventually arrested, interrogated under torture, and forced to weigh his conscience against his political beliefs.

The conflict between ideology and human decency shapes the novel from start to finish. As Krymov’s faith in Bolshevik cruelty totters, the German officer Bach’s attachment to Nazi cruelty strengthens. The two ideologies confront each other directly when the Bolshevik Mostovskoy, imprisoned in a Nazi camp, argues with the Russian-speaking SS officer Liss, who points out the uncanny parallels between Nazi and Soviet philosophy, ethics, and political practice. Mostovskoy also argues with an old-fashioned humanist, Ikonnikov, who has transcended his former faith in Christianity and Tolstoyanism to arrive at an ethical stance opposed to ideological thinking. If we regard the twentieth century as an age of ideology, we grasp why Life and Fate has struck many readers as so important.

Although it can be read on its own, Life and Fate is actually the second part of a “dilogy.” It continues the story of Grossman’s earlier novel, Stalingrad , which he was forced to publish under the title For a Just Cause , a phrase that Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had used to describe the Soviet war effort when he announced the German invasion. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s new translation of Stalingrad allows us to trace the earlier trajectory of Life and Fate ’s many real and fictional characters. First published when Stalin was still alive, Stalingrad is considerably less explicit than Life and Fate about its ethical and political themes. Even so, it was, by Soviet standards, remarkably bold.

As Alexandra Popoff explains in her new biography of Grossman, by the time he wrote Life and Fate in the late 1950s, he had already published competent, ideologically correct novels and had achieved fame, both in Russia and abroad, as the first serious writer to describe the Holocaust, which he witnessed firsthand as it was unfolding on Soviet territory. Grossman’s reportage included his powerful essay “The Hell of Treblinka,” which was entered into evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

John and Carol Garrard emphasized in an earlier biography of Grossman that Nazi genocide claimed the most important person in his life, his mother, and Shtrum’s agonies over not having saved his mother are closely based on Grossman’s own experience. 2 Researchers have discovered among Grossman’s papers two letters he wrote to her long after her death at times when he was especially troubled. She remained his moral touchstone, the one to whom he had to be truthful even when he deceived himself. Shtrum thinks of his mother in just this way.

Beginning in the fall of 1941, Grossman collaborated with the novelist Ilya Ehrenburg, the actor Solomon Mikhoels, and other prominent Jewish figures in establishing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which raised money and support in North America for the Soviet war effort. The JAC ’s most important project was The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry , a collection of documents, memoirs, and commentaries on the destruction of Soviet Jews. The book never appeared in the Soviet Union because, ironically enough, of anti-Semitism, which became Stalin’s policy after the war. To suggest that Jews suffered disproportionately under the Nazis was to “divide the dead,” and one had to refer not to Jewish victims but to “Soviet civilians.” Technically, anti-Semitism was still taboo, and so the press attacked “Zionists” and “rootless cosmopolitans,” a category that also included anyone who kowtowed to the West. Scientists had to pretend that all great discoveries had been made by Russians, and they cited Western work at their peril.

After the war the JAC was dissolved, and almost all its members were killed or sent to the Gulag. The Yiddish theater, Yiddish newspapers, and other Jewish cultural institutions were closed, while countless Jews were fired from their jobs or faced arrest for “bourgeois nationalism.” Shortly before his death, Stalin cooked up the Doctors’ Plot: it was claimed that several prominent physicians, mostly Jews, had conspired to murder top Kremlin officials at the behest of American intelligence. 3 In December 1952 Stalin declared to the Communist Party Presidium that “every Jew is a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence,” which meant that they all deserved execution or, at least, a long sentence of hard labor. Khrushchev later recalled Stalin suggesting that “some healthy elements among the workers” should be organized to “take clubs and…give these Jews a beating.” At best, the Jews were to suffer the fate of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, or other despised groups, deported en masse to remote eastern or northern regions where those who survived the journey would be left with little or no means of survival. Only Stalin’s sudden death on March 5, 1953, saved the Jews. A month later, the new leadership admitted that “impermissible means of interrogation”—that is, torture—had been used to extract the doctors’ confessions. Although torture had been a standard interrogation technique since 1937, this was, so far as I know, the first public admission of the practice.

One can therefore imagine the difficulties Grossman faced in 1949 when he tried to publish Stalingrad , with its Jewish hero, many Jewish characters, and discussions of the Holocaust. As Popoff notes, Shtrum’s Jewish name “alone could frighten editors out of their skin.” Grossman’s diary of his three-year campaign to get Stalingrad published shows how one editor after another, at times consulting with high party officials, demanded extensive omissions and additions. Grossman was willing to correct the ideological error of making ordinary soldiers responsible for the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. The correct view was that they succeeded because of the wise directives of the party and Stalin himself. To convey this official truth, Grossman resorted to a socialist-realist device I like to call Stalin ex machina : just when all seems lost, Stalin saves the day. He does not appear in person, but, as in Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned , the heroes read or hear one of his inspiring and instructive speeches.

When Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor of the prestigious journal Novy mir , which eventually serialized Stalingrad , suggested that Grossman “make your Shtrum the head of a military retail shop” rather than a great physicist, Grossman asked, “What position would you assign to Einstein?” Grossman records an exchange with another Novy mir editor, Boris Agapov:

Agapov : “I want to make your novel safe…from an ideological standpoint.”

Grossman : “Boris Nikolaevich, I don’t want to make my novel safe.”

Suitably mangled, Stalingrad at last appeared in Novy Mir in 1952. The novel begins on April 29, 1942, with Hitler’s meeting with Mussolini at Salzburg. Hitler boasts of German advances since the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and proclaims that “violence is the…source of all true greatness. I have restored to violence its true meaning.” Mussolini regards Hitler as a buffoon and a “Bohemian psychopath,” and considers his success “a bizarre freak.” With occasional flashbacks to earlier events, we learn how Grossman’s Russians react to their army’s constant retreating and at last make a stand at Stalingrad, a decision they contrast with General Kutuzov’s decision to abandon Moscow to Napoleon (which is described in War and Peace ). The novel concludes in the summer of 1942 with the Battle of Stalingrad underway and with Russians having found the resolve to resist successfully. That achievement forms the central plot of the novel.

When Pravda attacked Stalingrad for having too many Jews, the Novy mir editorial board apologized for publishing a work based on “a profoundly erroneous ideological conception.” Grossman’s life was in great danger, but after Stalin’s death the immensely popular novel was reprinted as a book in 1954 and again in 1956, though with appropriate changes as official ideology evolved.

No version, published or unpublished, fully accords with Grossman’s conception, and some manuscripts include splendid passages that have never been published. The editors of this English translation therefore chose to include as much fascinating material as possible, carefully indicating in an afterword the versions to which particular passages belong. The result is the most complete, most interesting, and artistically finest version of Stalingrad in any language.

Ryumin/V.I. Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature

Vasily Grossman, Armenia, 1961

Grossman believed that writers must, above all, tell the truth as they see it, which was, of course, impossible under Soviet conditions. Early in his career, Popoff relates, he appealed to the influential Maxim Gorky for help in getting his first novel published. “I wrote the truth,” Grossman pleaded. Gorky replied with the standard Soviet distinction between empirical truth and the higher truth of communism. “It is not enough to say, ‘I wrote the truth,’” Gorky instructed. “We know that there are two truths and that, in our world, it is the vile and dirty truth of the past that quantitatively preponderates. But this truth is being replaced by another truth that has been born and continues to grow.”

Grossman could not answer Gorky, but in Stalingrad he includes a conversation in which one member of the Shaposhnikov family, Marusya, tells her artistic sister Yevgenia to paint something resembling ideologically clear posters. “I know…you’ll start going on about truth to life,” Marusya says.

How many times do I have to tell you that there are two truths? There’s the truth of the reality forced on us by the accursed past. And there’s the truth of the reality that will defeat that past. It’s this second truth, the truth of the future, that I want to live by.

Another character, Sofya Osipovna, responds to Marusya: “I can tell you as a surgeon that there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths…. If you chase after two truths, you won’t catch either.”

In Stalingrad , Grossman relies on the technique Russians call “Aesopian language,” which hints at (or allegorizes, like Aesop’s fables) the unsayable. Life and Fate and Grossman’s last novel, Everything Flows , insist explicitly that Communism and Nazism are mirror images of each other, but Stalingrad could not. Instead it criticizes the Nazis for faults that readers would recognize as equally characteristic of the Soviets. One Nazi officer complains that “free scientific thought has been trashed….We have renounced universal truth, morality and humanity…. There is no place in Germany for bold minds and free spirits.” Then he cautions, “Only please forget all this…. You probably can’t begin to imagine the vast, invisible net that envelops us all. It catches…the most casual words, thoughts, moods, dreams and looks.”

When a Russian chemist who has just visited Nazi-controlled Austria reports that everyone fears everyone else, even their own families, Grossman’s readers may have recalled that Soviet children were taught to inform on their parents and that wives were arrested for “non-denunciation” of their husbands. His readers may also have appreciated the chemist’s complaint that the fascists condemn the morality of humanism and compassion, since the Soviets also rejected such universalist, rather than class-based, values. When Shtrum suggests the chemist publish his observations, he is reminded that since the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939, the Germans have been Soviet allies who must not be criticized. “It’s in our interest to reinforce the politics of peace, not to undermine them.”

For Grossman, the most important similarity between the two systems lies in their views of entire groups of people based not on what they do but on who they are. Class had the same place in Soviet ideology that race had in that of the Nazis. At the worst of times, descendants of aristocrats, merchants, or moderately prosperous peasants (“kulaks”) lost their lives by the millions. When times were better, they would merely have difficulty getting an education or finding a job. Class, like ethnic origin, did not depend on anything one could control: if your parents were kulaks, you were a class enemy. In one memorable scene in Life and Fate , Shtrum considers the monstrosity of killing people just because their parents were Jews and then, for the first time, reflects:

But then we have the same principle…. And we’re not talking about the merchants, priests and aristocrats themselves—but about their children and grandchildren. Does noble blood run in one’s veins like Jewishness? Is one a priest or a merchant by heredity?

One wonders how, even after Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, Grossman could ever have hoped to publish Life and Fate , which takes aim not just at Stalinism but at Marxism-Leninism itself. The journal to which he submitted it in 1960 promptly notified the Central Committee, which not only rejected the book but also ordered the KGB to raid Grossman’s house. In this relatively liberal period it chose to leave the author alone but instead “arrest the book.” In meetings with representatives of the writer’s union and the party’s chief ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, Grossman was told that his book, which was deemed far more dangerous than Doctor Zhivago , could not be published for two hundred years, a judgment that the novelist Vladimir Voinovich called a testimony to its lasting significance. “You think we have violated the principle of freedom in your case,” Suslov forthrightly explained. “Yes, that is so, if one interprets freedom in the bourgeois sense.”

Like the great classics of Russian realist fiction, both Stalingrad and Life and Fate pose questions about the nature of history, moral responsibility, good and evil—as well as the proper role of literature itself. In Life and Fate , the character Madyarov speaks for the author when he rejects not only socialist realism but also anything “decadent”—an expansive category that would have included modernist experimentalism or any self-conscious play with form—as betraying Russian literature’s high purpose.

Starting with Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead , the first prison-camp novel, Russian writers have often tested worldviews by placing their proponents in extreme conditions. In both parts of his epic, Grossman uses the bloody Battle of Stalingrad and the Nazi death camps in this way, while Life and Fate adds the torture chambers of Soviet interrogators. In addition, some characters in the second book have witnessed the deliberate mass starvation of millions of peasants during the collectivization of agriculture. When they bring to mind the image of children dying of hunger, whom they were forbidden to help, even dedicated Bolsheviks question their convictions. They recognize that to do extreme evil people must believe they are doing good. Some ideologues are disillusioned, but others accept Bolshevik cruelty even after they discover its full horror. Grossman asks: What inspires intelligent, decent people to endorse, let alone practice, totalitarian cruelty? For many Russian novelists and memoirists, this is the most important moral question of our time.

When the dedicated Bolshevik Mostovskoy is summoned by the SS officer Liss, he expects to be tortured but endures something that for him is even worse: doubt. With unsettling accuracy, Liss describes all the ways Nazis and Bolsheviks resemble each other. Both base their one-party states on terror and reject humanist morality; and, as Hitler boldly liquidated millions of Jews, “Stalin didn’t shilly-shally—he liquidated millions of peasants.” In fact, Liss explains, Hitler learned his totalitarianism directly from Lenin and Stalin. This Nazi even seems to foresee the Doctors’ Plot: “Today you’re appalled by our hatred of the Jews. Tomorrow you may make use of our experience yourselves.” Mostovskoy is shaken.

Krymov, Shtrum’s brother-in-law, also readily justifies the mass starvation of class enemies and arranges for the arrest of anyone expressing the slightest doubt about Soviet policies, but when he is arrested and tortured, he cannot help wondering whether torture caused other Communists to confess to absurd counterrevolutionary conspiracies. “Why does my Party need to destroy me?” he asks himself. “We were merciless towards the enemies of the Revolution. Why has the Revolution been so merciless towards us? Perhaps for that very reason.”

Krymov realizes that when he delivered speeches demanding the death sentence for Bukharin and other leaders, he did not really believe in their guilt. Or, rather, he both believed and disbelieved in it. Can it be, Krymov asks himself, “that I am a man with two consciences? Or that I am two men, each with his own conscience? But then that’s how it’s always been—for all kinds of people, not just for me.” Totalitarianism entails extreme forms of such doubling, either out of fear of arrest or a desire to maintain faith in official ideology even when experience contradicts it.

When innocent friends were arrested, Krymov asks himself, why did he refuse to help their families? By contrast, superstitious, politically undeveloped old women “would even take in children whose mothers and fathers had been arrested…. Were these old women braver and more honourable than Old Bolsheviks like Mostovskoy and Krymov?” Krymov knows that fear cannot excuse his morally repugnant behavior. “No, no! Fear alone cannot achieve all this. It was the revolutionary cause itself that freed people from morality in the name of morality.”

By the time he is imprisoned in a Nazi camp, Ikonnikov, who evidently speaks for the author, has come to reject not just Marxism but any ideology claiming to teach the whole moral truth. However idealistic, “the ethical systems of philosophers” lead to greater evil than any individual crimes. Even the Sermon on the Mount led to evil when Christians turned it into a philosophical system:

Sometimes the very concept of good becomes a scourge, a greater evil than evil itself…. I have seen the unshakeable strength of the idea of social good that was born in my own country…. I saw whole villages dying of hunger…. This idea was something fine and noble—yet it killed some without mercy, crippled the lives of others.

We often call the greatest Russian novels philosophical, but they might better be described as antiphilosophical, because they caution against placing one’s faith in any abstract system. “If we concede that human life can be governed by reason,” Tolstoy writes in War and Peace , “then the possibility of life is destroyed.” Nevertheless, Tolstoy himself later succumbed to the temptation of an all-encompassing moral theory when he formulated what he considered the real, pristine Christian truth. And Dostoevsky, for all his skepticism of abstractions, briefly thought he had discovered the key to history and had even discerned the exact date of the apocalypse. Only Grossman’s favorite writer, Chekhov, remained immune to the temptations of systems. The Soviets praise Chekhov, Madyarov remarks, only because they do not understand him. He stands apart from Russian political thinkers, who have “always been cruel, intolerant, sectarian…. True believers always want to bring God to man by force; and in Russia they stop at nothing—even murder—to achieve this.” With his deep appreciation of moral complexity, Chekhov suggested, as Madyarov puts it, “Let’s put God—and all these grand progressive ideas—to one side…. Let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man…. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual.”

Ikonnikov, too, calls on us to reject “this terrible Good with a capital G”; instead, he explains, “there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner,” or, presumably, the good of those ignorant old ladies who behave better than Bolsheviks. We need, he says, “the private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good.”

However difficult it is to make good moral choices, it is all the more so when one fears death, torture, and the Gulag. And yet Ikonnikov insists that even then there is no excuse for participating in evil. “I don’t want to be told that it’s the people with power over us who are guilty, that we’re innocent slaves, that we’re not guilty because we’re not free. I am free!… I can say ‘No’!” “A man may be led by fate,” Grossman explains in another passage, “but he can refuse to follow.” Ikonnikov is shot by the Nazis for refusing to work on the construction of an extermination camp.

Grossman knew that he himself had not lived up to his ideals. To the end of his life, he remained ashamed that he, like his hero Shtrum, had once signed a statement condemning the allegedly murderous doctors. “Why had he committed this terrible sin?” Shtrum asks himself. “Everything in the world is insignificant compared to the truth and purity of one small man.” Some of the book’s best chapters describe the complex inner processes, not reducible to any single cause, that lead Shtrum to commit what he knows is a disgraceful act.

The lesson of Shtrum’s moral fall lies in his reaction to it. All the obvious excuses occur to him, but he rejects them. “Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness,” he concludes. “The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed—while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.” Shtrum realizes that “it still wasn’t too late. He still had the strength to…remain his mother’s son…. He wanted this mean, cowardly act to stand all his life as a reproach; day and night it would be something to bring him back to himself.”

Grossman’s achievement lies in the profundity of his thought and his unflinching presentation of moral questions. For this reason, Life and Fate is indeed one of the great books of our time—despite its shortcomings as a novel. Grossman was fundamentally not a novelist but a journalist who had reflected on the totalitarian experience more deeply than his contemporaries. As a result, few of his characters are convincing as real people. Apart from Shtrum, they all seem like ideological mouthpieces. None is truly memorable—and that, perhaps, is the real test of a great novelist.

In this respect, Life and Fate brings to mind what Vissarion Belinsky, Russia’s greatest nineteenth-century critic, wrote about Alexander Herzen’s novel Who Is to Blame? That novel, Belinsky shrewdly remarked, reads as if the author first had some interesting ideas and then concocted a story in which characters could voice them. Belinsky was right: Herzen’s great literary achievement turned out to be not his fiction but his memoirs, My Life and Thought , in which he could directly voice his ideas as a thinker among thinkers. If only Grossman had arrived at something so suitable to his genius!

But does that really matter? Belinsky himself concluded that there are some talents whose “activities form a special sphere of art, in which imagination stands in the background and mind in the foreground. Little notice is taken of this distinction, whence great confusion ensues in the theory of art.” Tolstoy explained that War and Peace , with all its idiosyncrasies, is not a novel but simply “a book.” Russian writers and critics ever since have appreciated “books” whose profundity transcends the aesthetics of any particular genre. “A book,” wrote Boris Pasternak, “is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience—and nothing else!” Grossman demonstrates what a great book can do.

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Life and Fate was translated into English by Robert Chandler and first published by Collins Herville in 1985. New York Review Books reissued this translation in 2006.  ↩

John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (Free Press, 1996).  ↩

When Soviet archives were opened, it turned out the events surrounding the Doctors’ Plot were much more complex than they had seemed. Some conspiracies actually did exist—because Stalin himself set them in motion. They are best discussed in Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (Harper, 2004).  ↩

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Everything Flows

By vasily grossman , introduction by robert chandler , translated from the russian by robert chandler , elizabeth chandler , and anna aslanyan.

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Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate . The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. But in a novel that seeks to take in the whole tragedy of Soviet history, Ivan’s story is only one among many. Thus we also hear about Ivan’s cousin, Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, and Pinegin, the informer who got Ivan sent to the camps. Then a brilliant short play interrupts the narrative: a series of informers steps forward, each making excuses for the inexcusable things that he did—inexcusable and yet, the informers plead, in Stalinist Russia understandable, almost unavoidable. And at the core of the book, we find the story of Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan’s lover, who tells about her eager involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932–33, which led to the deaths of three to five million Ukrainian peasants. Here Everything Flows attains an unbearable lucidity comparable to the last cantos of Dante’s Inferno . Vasily Grossman, introduction by Robert Chandler, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Anna Aslanyan

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Series: NYRB Classics ISBN: 9781590173282 Pages: 272 Publication Date: December 1, 2009

A half century after his death, Vasily Grossman's fiction still provides harrowing insight into the legacy of Stalinism, and the historical trauma that continues to fuel ethnic tensions within Ukraine. — NPR Books

After he submitted his masterful World War II novel Life and Fate to a publisher in 1960, the KGB confiscated the manuscript, his notes and even his typewriter (the book was later smuggled out of the country and printed in 1974). But this didn't quiet Grossman, whose indictments of Stalinist Russia were at least as damning as those of George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Understandably bitter over the suppression of his work, the author worked on Everything Flows —a shorter, but even more eviscerating, meditation on the monstrous results of the Soviet experiment—until his death from cancer in 1964. This new translation brings his searing vision to light... Fortunately, the KGB couldn't keep Grossman's books under wraps forever. His testament stands as a fitting tribute to the millions of voices that were prematurely silenced. —Drew Toal, Time Out New York

...[A] richly-woven narrative of historical events and individual destinies — a masterpiece of pain, moral outrage and gallows humour. Grossman has become recognised not only as one of the great war novelists of all time but also as one of the first and most important of witnesses to the defence of Stalingrad, the fall of Berlin, the consequences of the Holocaust — Business Standard

Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR. —Martin Amis

This courageous novel, first published in samizdat, is a compelling restatement of some old truths about the fundamental and ineluctable nature of freedom. — New & Noteworthy, The New York Times

Remarkable...it trembles with the vision of freedom. — Irving Howe, The New York Times

[I]t is 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. — Thomas Lask, The New York Times

A "brilliant and courageous novel...readers will find hope in the narrator's uncommon capacity to forgive and accept."— Library Journal

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Tenacity, patience and attention to detail.

After a week of work, are there times when a book is the last thing you want to look at?

After a week of work the last thing I want to look at is a spreadsheet. A book is always welcome.

Have you ever bought a book from Amazon?

Have you ever folded over the corner of a page to keep your place?

In 65 years of being a reader, I must have at some point folded over the corner of a page. It is a practice I deplore.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Reading Henry Threadgill’s “Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music” was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I created for myself. Threadgill, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, is one of the most significant musical creators of the past 40 years. As I read his memoir I listened in chronological order to the nearly 40 albums that he has recorded since 1975. This took about 12 weeks. The interaction between reading and listening gave me a much deeper appreciation of the writer, musician and the music.

What books are on your night stand?

“Dark Soil,” edited by Angie Sijun Lou, with stories by Karen Tei Yamashita; “Exhibit,” R.O. Kwon; “Weird Black Girls,” Elwin Cotman; “Colored Television,” Danzy Senna; “Lost Writings: Two Novels,” Mina Loy; “Any Day Now: Toward a Black Aesthetic,” Larry Neal; “The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America,” Sara B. Franklin; “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” Evan Friss; “No Edges: Swahili Stories”; “American Abductions,” Mauro Javier Cárdenas; “Catalina,” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio .

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

Joseph Tom Burgess’ “Knots, Ties and Splices.” One of the skills I never mastered as a Boy Scout.

What kind of reader were you as a child?

Enthusiastic, undisciplined. My favorite book was Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows.”

What’s the last great book you read?

Hari Kunzru is one of my favorite writers. His most recent novel, “Blue Ruin,” is the concluding book in a series that began with “White Tears,” followed by “Red Pill.” Kunzru’s explorations of race, class, artistic creation and privilege in contemporary society are deeply enthralling.

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

“Divine Days,” by Leon Forrest, is an extraordinary polyphonic novel often compared to Joyce’s “Ulysses.” In my mind the more accurate comparison is to Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, conducted by Butch Morris (a performance that never actually occurred, but if I could create my own ideal performances it would be No. 1 on my list).

In “Reading the Room” you write that the shelving at City Lights is meant to encourage a “shimmering conversation.” How?

In some cases, it is very intentional and sometimes it is by serendipity. Intentionality is reflected in unique section categories, such as commodity aesthetics, topographies and somologistics.

Serendipity is reflected in alphabetical coincidence. In one of our contemporary literature sections, Julie Otsuka, Helen Oyeyemi and Ruth Ozeki find themselves immediately adjacent to each other. We take advantage of that by facing their titles out.

What’s the one change you’ve made at the store that you’d consider your crowning achievement?

The introduction of hardcovers. As a paperback-only store, we were not able to feature the early work of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said and others in hardcover. We had to wait typically 12 months before a paperback edition arrived. I argued that we were following and not shaping literary culture in the same way that City Lights publishing was doing. So we started carrying hardbacks. The impact was immediate.

You write that “this is one of the richest and most rewarding times to be a reader of literature.” Why?

In the past two decades we have seen the emergence of a brilliant cohort of authors: Colson Whitehead, Victor LaValle, Ayana Mathis, Elaine Castillo, Tommy Orange. And the literary progeny of Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Joy Harjo, Ana Castillo, Jessica Hagedorn, Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany, to name a few.

Parallel to this we have seen a litany of exciting international literature being translated and published by presses like Dalkey Archive, Open Letter, Deep Vellum, Two Lines and Dorothy, a publishing project. The last two Nobel Prizes in Literature have been published in the United States by independent presses: Seven Stories (Annie Ernaux) and Transit Books (Jon Fosse). Literary riches await curious readers in their local independent bookstore.

Why, then, do so many people say books don’t matter the way they once did?

My response is very parochial. At City Lights we see a growing enthusiasm, particularly among younger readers (from my perspective, anyone under 40), for printed matter.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers do you invite?

I would invite editor/publishers whose work helped shape City Lights: Blanche Knopf, Drenka Willen, Glenn Thompson, Toni Morrison (in her role as editor) and Sonny Mehta.

Explore More in Books

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John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Everything Flows (New York Review Books Classics) Kindle Edition

• Print length 272 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher NYRB Classics
• Publication date May 1, 2010
• File size 423 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

From publishers weekly.

" Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR" --Martin Amis

"After he submitted his masterful World War II novel Life and Fate to a publisher in 1960, the KGB confiscated the manuscript, his notes and even his typewriter (the book was later smuggled out of the country and printed in 1974). But this didn’t quiet Grossman, whose indictments of Stalinist Russia were at least as damning as those of George Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Understandably bitter over the suppression of his work, the author worked on Everything Flows —a shorter, but even more eviscerating, meditation on the monstrous results of the Soviet experiment—until his death from cancer in 1964. This new translation brings his searing vision to light... Fortunately, the KGB couldn’t keep Grossman’s books under wraps forever. His testament stands as a fitting tribute to the millions of voices that were prematurely silenced."—Drew Toal, Time Out New York

A "brilliant and courageous novel...readers will find hope in the narrator's uncommon capacity to forgive and accept."– Library Journal

"Few novels confront human suffering on as massive a scale as this one....Grossman's individual by individual portrayal of anguish gives readers a heartrending glimpse of the incomprehensible. " - Publishers Weekly

"This courageous novel, first published in samizdat, is a compelling restatement of so...

About the Author

Product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003K15IE4
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics (May 1, 2010)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 1, 2010
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 423 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• #720 in Political Fiction (Kindle Store)
• #1,600 in Classic American Literature
• #1,677 in Classic Literary Fiction

About the authors

Robert chandler.

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Vasily Grossman

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