Everything Flows

A New York Review Books Original 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.

"The majority of the papers herein originated at the workshop 'Process Philosophy of Biology' ... held in Exeter in November 2014."--Page vii.

The novel tells the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, who has returned to Russia after thirty years in the Gulag. After short and unsatisfying visits to familiar places and persons in Moscow and Leningrad, the hero settles in a southern provincial town where he briefly establishes a new life with a war widow. Ivan Grigoryevich eventually returns to his boyhood home on the Black Sea, where he is finally able to come to terms with the inhumanity of the new Russian regime.

The great Russian 20th-century novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad. Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war. Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece. 'A literary genius. His Life and Fate is rated by many as the finest Russian novel of the 20th Century' Mail on Sunday VINTAGE CLASSICS RUSSIAN SERIES - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows brings together the late essays, autobiographical reflections, an interview, and a poem by the eminent literary theorist and cultural critic Kenneth Burke (1897-1993). Burke, author of Language as Symbolic Action, A Grammar of Motives, and Rhetoric of Motives, among other works, was an innovative and original thinker who worked at the intersection of sociology, psychology, literary theory, and semiotics. This book, a selection of fourteen representative pieces of his productive later years, addresses many important themes Burke tackled throughout his career such as logology (his attempt to find a universal language theory and methodology), technology, and ecology. The essays also elaborate Burke's notions about creativity and its relation to stress, language and its literary uses, the relation of mind and body, and more. Provocative, idiosyncratic, and erudite, On Human Nature makes a significant statement about cultural linguistics and is an important rounding-out of the Burkean corpus.

Translated from the Thai by Dhammavidu Bhikkhu

William H. Rueckert's landmark 1963 study, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, is often credited with bringing the field of Burke studies into existence. Here, Rueckert has gathered his "encounters" with Burke over the past thirty years--brieft talks, position papers, rethinking and reformation of earlier ideas, and detailed analyses of individual texts--into one volume that offers readers the best of Burkean criticism.

The writer whom Vasily Grossman loved most of all was Anton Chekhov. Grossman’s own short stories are no less accomplished than his novels, and they are remarkably varied. “The Dog” is about the first living creature to be sent into space and then returned to Earth. “The Road,” an account of the war from a mule in an Italian artillery regiment, can be read as a 4,000-word distillation of Life and Fate. “Mother” is based on a true story about an orphaned girl who was adopted by Nikolay Yezhov (head of the NKVD at the height of the Great Terror) and his wife; it includes brief portraits of Stalin and several important Soviet writers and politicians—all of them as seen through the eyes of the little girl or of her honest but uncomprehending peasant nanny. As well as a dozen stories—from “In the Town of Berdichev” (Grossman’s first published success) to “In Kislovodsk” (the last story he wrote)—this volume includes an unusual article about the life of a Moscow cemetery. It also contains two letters Grossman wrote to his mother, after her death at the hands of the Nazis, and the complete text of “The Hell of Treblinka,” one of the very first, and still among the most powerful, accounts of a Nazi death camp.