The publication of a new scholarly collection dedicated to the life and works of Vasilii Grossman, one of the greatest Russian authors of the twentieth Century, should be a joyous occasion for readers and admirers of his talent, and for all who enjoy, love, and cherish those artistic achievements of the Soviet era that, in the words of Maurizia Calusio, one of the contributors to the collection reviewed here, lie “far outside the canons of the official literature” (95).

A key question that runs through all the articles included in this collection deals with the paradoxical, yet also explicable, reception of Grossman's literary legacy in the past decades. On the one hand, we are dealing with an author who has attained “classical” status; on the other, this seemingly basic fact still needs to be demonstrated over and over again. Although his works have been successfully translated into many languages and his literary legacy has drawn the attention of numerous scholars in Russia and abroad, Grossman has yet to assume his rightful place on the literary Olympus—unlike, say, his close friend Andrei Platonov. One cannot shake off the impression that the relentless courage with which this author exposed and unmasked the roots and nature of the totalitarian Soviet system has remained somewhat daunting to the present day. As a determined debunker of cultural myths—a man whose interpretation of Soviet history in particular, and Russian history in general, contradicted the official point of view—Grossman is bound to be regarded as a particularly ambivalent figure in our own time, when the rehabilitation of the “glorious past” of the Soviet empire has become such a pervasive and sensitive topic: while being admired by the adherents of democracy and the liberal values, he is treated as a persona non grata by the apologists of the imperialist mindset. The authors of this collection are well aware of this latter-day “ambivalence”; moreover, they turn it into one of their principal subjects, taking care to emphasize this in the editors’ Introduction: Grossman's “heretical” interpretation of Russian and Soviet history can be projected forward to our time and can serve as the touchstone for understanding the difficult relationship between Putin's Russia and Grossman's work (8).

One important (indeed, possibly the single most important) reason for the recent surge of interest in Grossman may be the desire to understand how a dissident author of such stature could have emerged and developed within the ideologically and organizationally monolithic edifice of Soviet literature. It is particularly fascinating to trace the way in which the images and ideas of this artist, who was trying to transcend the obligatory canon of socialist realism, were creating a space for the exposure of the ugly and hackneyed essence of all fakery and servility. Naturally, the yardstick of morality and the measure of moral values in Grossman's short stories and novels is the notion of the honor, dignity, and conscience of the author himself. We are particularly interested in the opposite process, however: how the books “wrote” their author, preventing him (like a frontline combatant) from fleeing the battlefield.

The conceptual unity of authors’ views in the included in this collection is noteworthy. Its semantic format turns the individual articles—which are technically numbered, creating the impression of chapters in a continuous text—into distinct elements that merge into a single, coherent ideological whole. The system of coordinates in which the phenomenon of Grossman is being examined here creates a tight linkage between the literary nature of his works and his political philosophy, and it is this effect of unity that creates a cohesive artistic vision, in which the author's individual style merges with his socially acute and significant subject matter.

In Grossman's works, the general theme that predominates over all others is, undoubtedly, that of political and moral freedom, which is defined by the collection's coeditor, Giovanni Maddalena, as “the relationship between individual freedom and power” (107). In his analysis of this concept, Maddalena puts forth a four-tiered hierarchy of freedom, which, according to him, encompasses all the flavors of this concept in Grossman's works. While one may take exception to the idea of compartmentalizing so complex and unquantifiable a phenomenon as freedom, we must nonetheless welcome the very attempt to elucidate the foundations of Grossman's political philosophy. It is hard to disagree with the claim that the political ideal of this Soviet writer is informed by expanding the boundaries of individual freedom for each member of society, and by the corresponding contraction of these boundaries for the so-called “arbiters of fate” (whether traditional monarchs or Secretaries-General of the Soviet Communist Party). Ultimately, this is the true subject matter of the “cold observations of his mind” and the “bitter remarks of his heart,” to use the language of classical Russian literature. In purely literary terms, the theme of freedom reaches its apex in Grossman's novels Life and Fate (1980) and Everything Flows (1970); covered in this collection in articles by Frank Ellis and Michele Rosboch. With unparalleled depth and conviction, Grossman is able to refute the half-truths about the true progenitor of the Soviet totalitarian system, Vladimir Lenin, and his brilliant heir and successor, Iosif Stalin, both of whom had created a unique model of state slavery under the guise of socialist democracy.

Yet when we speak of high art (and this is what Grossman's works are, first and foremost), any ideological content is bound to be fully subsumed by the literary text. Therefore, in order to reach, grasp, and sense this ideology, the reader must not attack the texts head-on; rather, they should engage in analytical flanking maneuvers—carefully contemplating, absorbing, and empathizing with the artistic substance that creates a clear separation between journalistic writings and literary images. Returning in this connection to G. Maddalena's article, which examines, inter alia, Grossman's short story The Resident, we should note that not all the works that came from his pen ought to be regarded as indisputable masterpieces. In our opinion, The Resident is a rather mediocre story, and its primary interest for scholars of Grossman's literary praxis lies in the author's attempt to merge “the bureaucratic absurdity” of the story's contents, which is remarked upon by Maddalena, with its form. And yet, the text itself contains such a plethora of extraneous details that the reader is bound to wonder whether this was done on purpose: might it not be that, apart from the authorial consciousness, the narrative texture of The Resident also contains another consciousness—an indifferent and bored one, which cares nothing for the story's tragic pathos, and whose sole concern is the thorough bureaucratic enumeration of all the surface details of the “physical reality”? There are numerous examples of such superfluous accessories, which occasionally attain a degree of significance, creating the artistic effect of a certain “information overload” (which, in my view, had been the author's goal all along). Ultimately, there is only one way to penetrate into the “Holy of Holies” of Grossman's thought—through an adequate analysis of his personal authorial codes, a description of his ars poetica.

In this respect, the article by one of the collection's editors, Anna Bolona, must be mentioned. Here, the author analyzes the linguistic manifestations of totalitarianism (the means and methods of “totalitarian communication”). An examination of the totalitarian schemes through the prism of sociolinguistics enables us to more adequately grasp the mechanism of the elimination of personal human space in totalitarian society: by submitting to the common linguistic clichés, the individual undergoes an “internalization” of sorts of the dominant ideology, turning into an appendage of the state apparatus. The author of the article convincingly demonstrates that one of the greatest achievements of Grossman the writer is his ability to convey, through purely literary techniques, the disintegration of the person within the totalitarian society: the subjugation of the individual to the collective through linguistic manipulations, the need to sacrifice the personal “I” to the impersonal “We,” the abandonment of private life for abstract social fetishes. The rule of language, logocracy—which all too often amounts to the tyranny of empty and vacuous terms and counterfeit verbal formulae—assumes control of the individual's “life and fate,” becoming an impenetrable wall between them and reality. The mass-production of stillborn idioms, their mindless repetition in everyday speech, have a hypnotizing effect on society, and this state of mass hypnosis serves as the perfect substrate for the emergence and cultivation of the totalitarian mass consciousness, which can be resisted only by a few loners.

Giuseppe Ghini's article is remarkable for its fruitful projection of the ideas expressed in one of Grossman's greatest works onto perennial human themes and images. In particular, the article tries to correlate Heraclites’ proverbial philosophical formula “everything flows” with the narrative of the eponymous novel; with its finale, which mentions the Biblical “prodigal son,” and with Rembrandt's celebrated painting The Return of the Prodigal Son (1669). This correlation draws our attention to an important conceptual counterpoint of Grossman's philosophy—the ever-shifting, eventful vortex of time, with its regime changes and social crises, its succession of temporal rulers (“kings for an hour”), against the backdrop of an eternal world order of immutable rules and laws, and a slow-changing nature of things. As the article points out, the story is shot through with the theme and image of the prodigal son; this theme serves as an intermittent leitmotif—which, despite its variable intensity, is never completely absent from the pages of the text.

I believe that all the readers of this collection will agree that it constitutes an important contribution to the study of the anti-totalitarian, “heretical” branch (Frank Ellis) of Russian literature in the past century. Naturally, it is very difficult to achieve total comprehensiveness in such a work, consisting as it does of contributions by several authors, each of whom has their own scholarly agenda, and none of whom aims to satisfy all of the readers’ potential demands and expectations. Nevertheless, it is necessary to mention the conspicuous absence of the Jewish theme from this panoramic study, even though this theme played a crucial role in Grossman's life, fate, and works. This omission seems quite glaring.

The collection uses different translations of the title of Grossman's novel Vse techet: apart from the usual Everything Flows (this is the title of its English translation by R. Chandler and E. Chandler, with A. Aslanyan. London: Vintage Books, 2010), the article by Frank Ellis (123–40) uses the title Forever Flowing, which technically violates the principle of uniformity that ought to be adhered to in collections of this kind.

Modern studies of Grossman rarely mention the name of Nina Yelina, a prominent Russian scholar of Dante who, during the Israeli period of her life, wrote and published a remarkable Russian-language book titled Vasily Grossman (Jerusalem, 1994). It seems that scholars are simply unaware of its existence—as per tradition, this title is also absent from the list of authors of monographs on Grossman that appears in the collection reviewed here (12n22).