Between the State's Devilish Temptation and the Possibility of Repentance: Cains and Judases in Vasily Grossman's Novel Everything Flows

Abstract

The paper is structured as a slow reading (commentary) in chronological order of those chapter excerpts of Vasily Grossman's last novel, Everything Flows, which are devoted to the protagonist's return from the labor camp and his conversations with those outside (chapters 1–14). Over the course of this slow reading, I identify keywords concerning the opposition between soul and body, repentance and penance. Another area of analysis is Grossman's polemic with other Soviet writers who published works about informers and Gulag prisoners. In the first part of the paper, I show that in this polemic, Veniamin Kaverin emerges as a particularly important opponent for Grossman. Reconstructing first the allusions to Kaverin's prose in Everything Flows and then the images of the Judases-informers, I suggest that on the level of images, the novel contrasts the informers Cain and Judas and proposes a classification of the guilt of those who preserved their civic lives over those who spent years in the labor camps.