Not least among Vasily Grossman’s great achievements as a Soviet writer was his ability to fashion a true art form out of the procrustean genre of socialist realism. His technique was as simple as it was subversive. Rather than employ his characters as monotone metaphors acting in the service of revolutionary fantasy, he made them into variegated people besieged by revolutionary reality. As the protagonist of Everything Flows, Grossman’s third novel, puts it: “The literature that called itself ‘realist’ was as convention-ridden as the bucolic romances of the eighteenth century. The collective farmers, workers, and peasant women of Soviet literature seemed close kin to those elegant, slim villagers and curly-headed shepherdesses in woodland glades, playing on reed pipes and dancing, surrounded by little white lambs with pretty blue ribbons.” Grossman let war, persecution and genocide serve as his backdrop but he was most preoccupied with the fate of ordinary human beings caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Down to the last battlefield commissar, guilt-ridden informant, or NKVD agent, his characters were imbued with a psychological and moral complexity rare for any age, much less a totalitarian one that forced an artistic parade ground upon what Max Eastman once witheringly termed “writers in uniform.”

That Grossman survived the twentieth century is no less remarkable than the fact that he became a great Russian novelist in it. He was born in 1905 in the heavily Jewish town of Berdichev. Originally trained as a chemist, he became a famous World War II correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, whose articles were read aloud for inspiration in the ranks of the Red Army, with whom he returned in 1943 to witness Ukraine’s “liberation” from Nazi occupation as well as the gruesome discoveries of Babi Yar and Treblinka—and Berdichev. His beloved mother was one of the thirty thousand of Berdichev’s Jewish population slaughtered in Hitler’s abattoir in the Caucasus. It was a devastating personal loss that furnished one of Grossman’s great leitmotifs of maternal nostalgia. He also had the distinction, if the term isn’t obscene in this context, of being the first writer in any language to document the death camps. His article, “The Hell of Treblinka,” written in 1944, was used by the prosecution as testimonial at Nuremberg.

Everything Flows only appeared in the Soviet Union in 1989 after three decades of censorship; Grossman died of stomach cancer before completing the book, which has just been re-translated into English by Robert Chandler. A more pessimistic follow-up to Life and Fate, Grossman’s Tolstoyan masterpiece about World War II, it tells the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, who has just been released from the gulag after serving a thirty year sentence for questioning the legitimacy of dialectical materialism. His manumission is rooted in a simple historical development—Stalin has died—though the climate of paranoia and mutual incrimination persists. Grossman is hyper-attuned to every itch and impulse of a society that has just been allowed to breath a little easier but is by no means free.

Consider how well he describes the competing emotions of guilt and defiance in Ivan Grigoryevich’s cousin Nikolay Andreyevich, who suffers from the Soviet species of survivors’ guilt. His particular case has manifold causes. As a mediocre biologist, his professional fortunes have risen amidst Stalin’s last act of cruelty before dying—the anti-Semitic purge of the sciences in the wake of the fabricated “Doctor’s Plot” which ended the careers and lives of so many brilliant colleagues—and, unlike the rebellious Ivan Grigoryevich, he has mainly kept his head below the parapet:

Yes, his whole life had passed by in obeisance, in a great act of submission, in fear of hunger, torture, and forced labor in Siberia. But there had also been a particularly vile fear—the fear of receiving not black caviar but red caviar, mere salmon caviar, in his weekly parcel of food from the Institute. And this vile ‘caviar’ fear had co-opted his adolescent dreams from the time of War Communism; it had made use of them for its own shameful ends. What mattered was to have no doubt or hesitations; what mattered was to give his vote, to sign his name, without a second thought. Yes, yes, what had nourished his unshakable ideals was two very different fears: fear for his own skin—of being skinned alive—and fear of losing his entitlement to a bit of black caviar.