STANISLAW BARANCZAK
61
sidered as a novel, though,
Forever Flowing
seems to be a work as crip–
pled as it is ambitious. The plot, begun in a realistic vein, is ap–
parently unable to contain the scope and carry the burden of the
book's problematics, and Grossman, as it were, discards it midway
through in favor of a straightforward discourse in which the two pro–
tagonists serve merely as mouthpieces for the author's own opinions.
One is tempted to see in this, however, not so much an artistic
failure as evidence of Grossman's honesty as a writer- his indirect
expression of distrust in the traditional instruments of the realistic
novel. Juxtaposed with the bestiality and absurdity of history, the
authoritative role of an omniscient narrator- that of a rational ex–
plainer, organizer of the plot, supplier of moralistic instruction–
could indeed seem impossible to retain in a longer run. Thus, Gross–
man's narrator is omniscient so long as he confines himself to pre–
senting the novel's setting and initial situations. It is characteristic
that he abandons this role for the first time in Chapter Seven, which
is focused on the issue of the guilt and moral responsibility of people
who in the years of Stalinism served as informers. At this point,
there is no use for the narrator's authoritative explanation or un–
equivocal moralistic commentary, precisely because one of the chief
evils of totalitarian terror is that under its circumstances the issues of
guilt and responsibility become ambiguous and blurred. Hence–
forth, the figure of an omniscient narrator appears as increasingly
inadequate, and the only way Grossman can carry the weight of the
issues raised in his novel is ultimately through direct, essayistic
rather than novelistic, discourse.
As such,
Forever Flowing
remains not only a profound and
honest analysis of the phenomenon of Soviet totalitarianism, but
also an important indication of the vicious circle in which the tradi–
tion of literary realism has found itself in our age. On the one hand,
the enormity of human suffering under totalitarian systems demands
realistic description more than any other approach; on the other, tp.e
authoritative role of the realistic narrator, which so often accompa–
nies this approach, seems today more inconceivable than ever before.
A writer who seems to have been more acutely aware of this
conundrum than most of his contemporaries - and who, while re–
maining a true-blue realist, found perhaps the most artistically satis–
fying way out of it- is Yuri Trifonov (1925-1981), whose last novel,
The Old Man
(Simon and Schuster), is a fitting culmination of his
unique career. Trifonov was perhaps the only Soviet writer in the re–
cent decades who managed to attain the maximum of honesty in his
