Mikhail Sholokhov

Mikhail Sholokhov: The Don Epic and Its Doubters

In 1928 a twenty-three-year-old with almost no formal education published the opening volumes of a Cossack epic so assured that a rumour immediately spread through literary Moscow: he must have stolen the manuscript from a dead White officer. Sholokhov's response was to hand *Pravda* his drafts and demand an investigation. He won that round in 1929, and then spent the next seventy years — most of them posthumously — fighting the same accusation over and over.

An Outsider on the Don

He was born on 24 May 1905 in the Don Host Oblast, in Cossack country, and was not a Cossack. His father, Aleksander Sholokhov, was by turns a farmer, cattle trader and miller; his mother, Anastasia Chernikova, came of Ukrainian peasant stock and taught herself to read for the specific purpose of writing letters to her son. The family were *inogorodnye* — "outsiders," the marginal caste in Cossack society. It is the single most useful fact about his fiction: he wrote the great novel of the Don from inside the community and slightly outside it at once.

His schooling ran through Karginskaya, Moscow, Boguchar and Veshenskaya, and stopped in 1918. At thirteen he attached himself to the Bolshevik side of the civil war, serving with Red forces until 1922. That year he went to Moscow, worked as a stevedore, stonemason and accountant, and pushed into writers' seminars; his first published piece, a satirical article called "The Test," appeared on 19 October 1923. He was writing at seventeen and finished his first story, "The Birthmark," at nineteen. In 1924 he returned to Veshenskaya and married Maria Gromoslavskaia, an ataman's daughter, with whom he had four children.

Tikhii Don

*Tales from the Don* (1926) drew directly on what he had seen in the world war and the civil war. Then came the work that consumed fourteen years: *Tikhii Don*, four volumes, published in English as *And Quiet Flows the Don*, tracking the Cossacks through revolution and fratricidal war. The Nobel Foundation's own account of it reaches for Tolstoy — vividly realistic scenes, vast panoramas — and the comparison is the standard one. The book won the Stalin Prize in 1941 and has never stopped being his monument.

The Accusation

The charge that he had not written it began in 1928 and outlived him. A special commission examined his materials in 1929 and found no evidence of plagiarism, noting that the manuscript's style matched *Tales from the Don*. In the 1960s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn revived the claim prominently — a move complicated by the fact that Sholokhov had attacked *One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich* — and the dead anti-Bolshevik Cossack writer Fyodor Kryukov became the leading rival candidate. In 1984 the Norwegian Slavicist Geir Kjetsaa and colleagues published statistical work on sentence length that supported Sholokhov. The matter effectively closed in 1987, when several hundred pages of 1920s drafts and notes surfaced: 605 in Sholokhov's own hand, 285 transcribed by his wife and sisters. The Russian Academy of Sciences acquired them in 1999 and affirmed his authorship, with Felix Kuznetsov reconstructing the creative process in detail. A minority dissent persists — the Russian-Israeli linguist Zeev Bar-Sella has argued for the writer Viktor Sevsky — but it is a minority.

Letters to Stalin

Sholokhov joined the Communist Party in 1932 and was elected to the Supreme Soviet in 1937, and he did something almost nobody else survived doing: he told Stalin the truth. Writing from Veshenskaya through the 1930s about conditions on the collective farms, he warned in January 1931 that "without exaggeration, conditions are catastrophic." On 4 April 1933 he described torture by OGPU officers in his district; Stalin sent the investigator Matvei Shkiryatov, the officers were arrested and sentenced to death, the sentences were later commuted, and extra food was shipped to the region. When his friend P. K. Lugovoi was arrested in August 1937, Sholokhov refused to attend an international writers' conference until Stalin intervened; Lugovoi and two others were released that November. A 1938 encounter with the wife of NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov in a bugged hotel room brought surveillance down on him, and he complained to Stalin about it twice that October.

Virgin Soil and Stockholm

*Podnyataya tselina* — *Virgin Soil Upturned* — took twenty-eight years and two parts, 1932 and 1960, to say what he had to say about collectivisation, and won the Lenin Prize; it became notably influential on Chinese socialist literature. "The Fate of a Man" (1957) was filmed by Sergei Bondarchuk in 1959, and the war novel *They Fought for Their Country* was never finished. He was made an Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939, twice Hero of Socialist Labour, and a member of the Central Committee in 1961. In 1965 he took the Nobel Prize in Literature for his portrayal of the life and fate of the Russian people. He spent the Order of Lenin money on a school for his village and the Nobel money on a driving holiday through Europe and Japan with his family.

The Hardening

Then, in 1966, he chose the wrong side loudly. At the 23rd Party Congress he said the prison sentences given to the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were "much too lenient" by the revolutionary standards of the 1920s. Open letters from Lydia Chukovskaya and Yuri Galanskov followed, and a large part of the Soviet intelligentsia never forgave him. In 1972 he moved against Alexander Yakovlev over an article criticising Russian nationalism, and Yakovlev was removed and sent to Canada as ambassador. Sholokhov nearly stopped writing after 1969. He died of laryngeal cancer on 21 February 1984 and is buried in the yard of his house at Veshenskaya.

Why Mikhail Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is architectural. *And Quiet Flows the Don* holds an entire society — a caste, a region, a war that split families down the middle — across four volumes and fourteen years without losing the individual human being inside it, and it renders both Reds and Whites as people rather than positions. The Nobel Foundation's own summary places him as a synthesiser of the artistic heritage of Tolstoy and Gogol together with Gorky's innovations, and reaches for Tolstoy again when describing the panoramas. He began this at around twenty-one, with schooling that ended at thirteen, which is the part that genuinely resists explanation and is precisely why the plagiarism rumour found purchase.

The counter-case has three parts and none of them is trivial. First, the authorship question dogged him for six decades; the 1987 manuscripts and the Academy's 1999 finding settle it for most scholars, but the fact that the doubt was sustainable that long tells you how anomalous the achievement looked. Second, it is essentially one book. *Virgin Soil Upturned* took twenty-eight years and served state doctrine on collectivisation; after 1969 he barely wrote at all. Third, the man who risked himself to tell Stalin about torture in 1933 was the man who in 1966 demanded harsher prison terms for two novelists. Genius here means one extraordinary act of construction, executed young, by a writer whose courage and conformity were tangled together for life.

Legacy

The Don books remain the great fictional account of the Cossacks destroying themselves between 1914 and 1922, and they survive the politics of their author because he let the losing side speak. His house at Veshenskaya is now the National Sholokhov Museum-Reserve; statues of his characters stand there and in Rostov-on-Don; an asteroid and a Moscow university carry his name. The prize and the accusation arrived together and have travelled together ever since — which is, in the end, a fair description of the century he wrote about.

Achievements

• State Stalin Prize, 1st degree — 1941
• Medal "For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"
• Order of Lenin — 1939
• Order of the October Revolution — 1971
• Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class — 1945
• Notable work: Fate of a Man
• Notable work: And Quiet Flows the Don
• Notable work: The New Land
• Notable work: They Fought for their Country
• Genres: sketch story