Василий Гроссман. и первый опыт художественного исследования Гулага (О повести Все течет…)

Abstract

It is difficult to determine which genre Vasily Grossman’s last work Everything flows (1955-1963) belongs to. In the last decades of the XX century, literary critics noticed how this work completely lacks a plot and a fabula. Some researchers have even refused to call this text a ‘literary work’. In this article, an attempt has been made to show how Grossman, when talking about themes that were still inaccessible for that time (the system of labour camps, Holodomor and so on), created a completely new and audacious way of narrating. Grossman’s apparent contemptuous approach to the rules of narration in Everything flows is actually generated by the need to tell without lies the indescribable and ineffable human journey in the camps. In this article, we analyze the motifs of travel and dream, as well as the figure of preterition, which Grossman uses to express his dissent from the falsity of socialist realism.