Mikhail Sholokhov

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov

Sholokhov, 1938
Born May 24, 1905
Vyoshenskaya, Russian Empire
Died February 21, 1984 (aged 78)
Vyoshenskaya, Soviet Union
Occupation Novelist
Nationality Soviet
Ethnicity Russian, Ukrainian
Notable awards Nobel Prize in Literature
1965
Signature

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (/ˈʃɔːləˌkɔːf, -ˌkɒf/;[1] Russian: Михаи́л Алекса́ндрович Шо́лохов) (May 24 [O.S. May 11] 1905 – February 21, 1984) was a Soviet/Russian novelist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during Russian revolution, Civil War and collectivization, primarily the famous And Quiet Flows the Don.

Life and work

Sholokhov was born in Russia, in the "land of the Cossacks" – the Kruzhilin hamlet, part of stanitsa Vyoshenskaya, in the former Administrative Region of the Don Cossack Army.

His father, Aleksander Mikhailovich (1865–1925), was a member of the lower middle class, at times a farmer, cattle trader, and miller. Sholokhov's mother, Anastasia Danilovna Chernikova (1871–1942), the widow of a Cossack, came from Ukrainian peasant stock (her father was a peasant in the Chernihiv oblast). She did not become literate until a point in her life when she wanted to correspond with her son.

Sholokhov attended schools in Kargin, Moscow, Boguchar, and Veshenskaya until 1918, when he joined the Bolshevik side in the Russian civil war at the age of 13. He spent the next few years fighting in the civil war.

Sholokhov began writing at 17. He completed his first literary work, the short story, The Birthmark, at 19.

In 1922 Sholokhov moved to Moscow to become a journalist, but he had to support himself through manual labour. He was a stevedore, stonemason, and accountant from 1922 to 1924, but he also intermittently participated in writers' "seminars". His first published work was a satirical article, The Test (Oct. 19, 1923).[2]

New memorial to Mikhail Sholokhov in Moscow, Gogol boulevard

In 1924 Sholokhov returned to Veshenskaya and devoted himself entirely to writing. In the same year he married Maria Petrovna Gromoslavskaia (1901-1992), the daughter of Pyotr Gromoslavsky, the ataman of the Bukanovskaya stanitsa; they had two daughters and two sons.

His first book Tales from the Don, a volume of stories about his native region during World War I and the Russian Civil War, largely based on his personal experiences, was published in 1926. The story "Nakhalyonok", partially based on his own childhood, was later made into a popular film.

In the same year Sholokhov began writing And Quiet Flows the Don which earned the Stalin Prize and took him fourteen years to complete (1926–1940). It became the most-read work of Soviet fiction and was heralded as a powerful example of socialist realism, and it earned him the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. It deals with the experiences of the Cossacks before and during World War I and the Russian Civil War.

Virgin Soil Upturned, which earned the Lenin Prize, took 28 years to complete. It was composed of two parts: Seeds of Tomorrow (1932) and Harvest on the Don (1960), and reflects life during collectivization in the Don area.

The short story The Fate of a Man (1957) was made into a popular Russian film.

His unfinished novel, They Fought for Their Country is about World War II fighting in the USSR (in Russia the Soviet-German war during World War II is commonly referred to as the Great Patriotic War).

Monument to Mikhail Sholokhov in Rostov-on-Don

In the 1930s he wrote several letters to Joseph Stalin about the appalling conditions in the kolkhozes and sovkhozes along the Don, requesting assistance for the farmers.[3]

During World War II Sholokhov wrote about the Soviet war efforts for various journals. He also covered the devastation caused by Nazi troops along the Don. His mother was killed when Veshenskaya was bombed in 1942.

Sholokhov's collected works were published in eight volumes between 1956 and 1960.

Authorship of texts

Sholokhov was accused of plagiarizing And Quiet Flows the Don, which made his international reputation. Sholokhov's critics claimed that it was written by Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and Anti-Bolshevik, who died in 1920.[4][5]

Because of the accusations started in 1928 Sholokhov asked Pravda newspaper to prove his authorship. He submitted his manuscripts of the first three volumes of And Quiet Flows the Don and the plan of the fourth one. A special commission in 1929 was formed that accepted Sholokhov's authorship. In the conclusion signed by four experts the commission stated that there was no evidence of plagiarism on the one hand and on the other hand the manuscripts style was close to the previous Sholokhov's book The tales of the Don.[6]

The allegations resurfaced in the 1960s with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a notable proponent, possibly in retaliation for Sholokhov's scathing opinion of Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.[7]

In 1984 Norwegian Slavicist and mathematician Geir Kjetsaa together with three other colleagues in a monograph provided statistical analyses proving that Mikhail Sholokhov was likely the true author of And Quiet Flows the Don.[8] And in 1987, several thousand pages of notes and drafts of the work were discovered and authenticated, including chapters excluded from the final draft.[7]

During the Second World War, Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid, and only the fourth volume survived. Sholokhov had his friend Vassily Kudashov, who was killed in the war, look after it. Following Kudashov's death, his widow took possession of the manuscript, but she never disclosed her ownership.

The manuscript was finally found by the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1999 with assistance from the Russian Government. The writing paper dates back to the 1920s: 605 pages are in Sholokhov's own hand, and 285 are transcribed by his wife Maria and sisters.[9]

In 1999 the Russian Academy of Science carried out an analysis of the manuscript and came to the conclusion that And Quiet Flows the Don had been written by Sholokhov himself.[10]

However, there are still defenders of theory of Sholokhov's plagiarism. The Swiss Slavicist Felix Philipp Ingold stated in 2006 in a Swiss newspaper that it is "almost certain" that the novel is a "stolen compilation". He added that Sholokhov, in spite of his public glorification as a "proletarian Tolstoy", was a literarily inexperienced author, far from being well-read, who was recruited at a young age by the GPU and was prepared for the role of a major writer and party belletrist. Consequently, according to Ingold, the name Sholokhov does not represent a real author, but a "sorry effort of anonymous ghostwriters", in addition to plagiarizing Kryukov and in some passages also Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov.[11]

Communist party and Soviet state activities

Sholokhov joined the CPSU in 1932, and in 1937 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In 1959 he accompanied Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on a trip to Europe and the United States. He became a member of the CPSU Central Committee in 1961, Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939, and was a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet. He was twice awarded Hero of Socialist Labor, and later became vice president of the Union of Soviet Writers.

Legacy

An asteroid in main-belt is named after him, 2448 Sholokhov.

Selected publications

References

  1. ↑ "Sholokhov". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
  2. ↑ Ermolaev, Herman. Mikhail Sholokhov and his art. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. 9.
  3. ↑ ФЭБ: Переписка – 1997 (описание)
  4. ↑ BOOKEND; The Don Flows Again by Michael Scammell, New York Times
  5. ↑ http://exlibris.ng.ru/fakty/2006-11-30/3_otvet.html
  6. ↑ Письмо в редакцию // Правда. 1929. 29 марта. С. 4. (A Letter to the Editorial Office. Pravda, 1929, 29 of March, p. 4.) (Russian)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Ф. Кузнецов. Рукопись "Тихого дона" и проблема авторства (F. Kuznetsov. Rough drafts of And Quiet Flows the Don and the problem of authorship) (Russian)
  8. ↑ Kjetsaa, G., Gustavsson, S., Beckman, B., Gil, S. (1984) The Authorship of “The Quiet Don”, Solum Forlag A.S., Oslo/Humanities Pres, NJ.
  9. ↑ http://www.trud.ru/issue/article.php?id=200005250940801
  10. ↑ http://lenta.ru/russia/1999/10/25/sholohov/
  11. ↑ Felix Philipp Ingold: Geklonter Nobelpreisträger. Ein epochaler Betrug – neue Debatten um Michail Scholochow. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 23. August 2006. online

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