In September 1927, a young Don writer Mikhail Sholokhov arrived in Moscow. He brought with him the first three parts of the novel Quiet Flows the Don. In the capital, Sholokhov managed to meet with the editor-in-chief of the October magazine A. Serafimovich, who approvingly assessed the work of the young Cossack, and two years before that he wrote a positive review of the collection of Sholokhov's Don Stories.
It was thanks to Serafimovich that, already at the beginning of 1928, October began to publish a new novel, which was enthusiastically received by readers. Critics noted the extraordinary maturity of a very young author, but a year later a rumor began to spread in literary circles: Sholokhov had nothing to do with the novel The Quiet Flows the Don. He simply appropriated someone else's manuscript and published it under his own name. The question remained open: who, then, is the real author of the novel?
According to the most common version, the manuscript of the Don Cossack Fyodor Kryukov, who died in 1920 from typhus, fell into the hands of Sholokhov. In addition, there were rumors that Kryukov did not die of an illness, but was killed by Pyotr Gromoslavsky, who later became Sholokhov's father-in-law. Perhaps Gramoslavsky stole the manuscript of The Quiet Flows the Don, and a few years later gave it to his son-in-law, a novice writer?
True, Sholokhov found influential intercessors. The Pravda newspaper published a letter from famous writers, including Serafimovich, Fadeev, Averbakh and others. They declared that they had no doubts about the authorship of Sholokhov, and the slanderers were threatened with legal proceedings.
Sholokhov himself presented a whole pile of drafts and offered a special commission to look into this "dark" story. The conclusion was as follows: there is no doubt that Mikhail Sholokhov is the author of The Quiet Flows the Don. For several decades, the rumors subsided.
They returned to this issue only 40 years later, when Sholokhov had already become a Nobel laureate, by the way, the prestigious prize was awarded to him precisely for the novel Quiet Flows the Don. For example, A. I. Solzhenitsyn wrote that such a grandiose literary work could not be written by a 22-year-old youth, only an experienced master could do it.
Even computer equipment had to be connected to the investigation. So, in 1984, the Norwegian philologist Geir Hjetso conducted a computer study, as a result of which he published the book “Who Wrote The Quiet Flows the Don?” In it, the Norwegian claimed that even a computer confirmed the authorship of Sholokhov.
In 1999, at the Institute of World Literature. Gorky received the original manuscript of the first two books of The Quiet Flows the Don, written by Sholokhov. The very ones that he presented to the commission back in 1929. This time it was announced that all suspicions of plagiarism had been removed from Sholokhov.
In 1941, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov received the Stalin Prize for his novel The Quiet Flows the Don. A few months later, the Great Patriotic War began, and the writer transferred the money received to the Defense Fund. After receiving the Nobel Prize, the writer built a new school in his native village Veshenskaya. In addition, Sholokhov was also awarded the Lenin Prize for his novel Virgin Soil Upturned. The writer sent her to the village of Karginskaya, where a school was also built.
On March 21, 1929, Stalin decided that the author of The Quiet Flows the Don should be a young proletarian writer. In No. 44 we returned to the unfinished dispute about the authorship of The Quiet Flows the Don. The book is about to be published...
On March 21, 1929, Stalin decided that the author of The Quiet Flows the Don should be a young proletarian writer.
In issue 44 we returned to the unfinished dispute about the authorship of The Quiet Flows the Flows Flows. The reason was the forthcoming book by the Israeli linguist Zeev Bar-Sella. Today is a continuation of the theme. The authors of the article - Andrey and Svetlana Makarov - have been doing it for a long time. They published books exploring the biggest literary mystery of the 20th century: “Around the Quiet Don: from myth-making to the search for truth”, M., “Probel”, 2000 and “Flower-Tatarnik. In search of the author of The Quiet Flows the Don: from M. Sholokhov to F. Kryukov, M., AIRO-XX, 2003
Department of Culture
Last Witness
At the beginning of 1992, we published our first work about the authorship of The Quiet Flows the Don and at the same time made a story about it in the Leningrad TV program Truth is Dearer. And after the transfer, we unexpectedly received a letter from Alexander Longinovich Ilsky. Professor, doctor of technical sciences, in those distant years, “from the end of 1927 to April 1930, while still young, he worked in the editorial office of Roman-gazeta ... as the technical secretary of the editorial office.” And here is what Alexander Longinovich told us:
“I am obviously one of the last participants in the events at the time of the appearance of the work “Quiet Don” in 1928. I am four years younger than Sholokhov M.A., and during that period I often met with M.A. Sholokhov, registered his manuscripts, handed them over to the Mashburo to print and practically participated in all this kitchen, as the author of The Quiet Flows the Don was made from Sholokhov.
Not only I, but everyone in our editorial office knew that M. A. Sholokhov never wrote the first four parts of the novel The Quiet Flows the Don. It was like this: at the end of 1927, M.A. Sholokhov brought one copy to the editorial office. manuscripts of about 500 pages of typewritten text ... "
When, a year after the publication of the novel, persistent conversations and rumors about plagiarism arose, Anna Grudskaya, the editor-in-chief of RG, Anna Grudskaya, “gathered us in the editorial office and said that there ... at the top it was decided that the author of The Quiet Flows the Don should be a young proletarian writer M. A. Sholokhov ... Sholokhov was a young man at that time, he often visited the editorial office, I spoke with him many times, he was modest, cheerful, a good rider, but he never talked about the Quiet Don in conversations . In the editorial office, we all knew that this manuscript somehow got to him. But that it was not Sholokhov, everyone here knew it ... We always had a whole company of so-called young proletarian writers spinning in our editorial office, whose works no one published. They, of course, were terribly jealous of Sholokhov. Why did the choice fall on him? But not on any of them? I think that most of them, without blinking an eye, would agree to become the author of The Quiet Flows the Don. But the choice was made ... ".
The circumstances of the creation of the novel and its publication are hidden by mountains of lies and hoaxes that accompanied Sholokhov throughout his life. What is at least the question of the date of his birth. The anniversary (“centenary”) is scheduled to be celebrated in 2005, although it has long been documented that Sholokhov’s age was reduced in 1922 in order to “throw off” (as they say today) the young “tax inspector” from prison, which threatened him for participating in fraud. (We note, by the way, that on the gravestone in Veshenskaya you will not read either the date of birth of Sholokhov or the date of birth of his wife - they are not there.) Therefore, in search of a solution to the riddle of The Quiet Flows the Don, we turned to studying, first of all, the text of the novel.
"The Last Turkish Campaign"
The first thing to be clarified was whether The Quiet Flows the Don was written by one person, or whether two or more authors participated in its creation at different stages. We found the key to its solution by analyzing the many blunders found in the novel.
They begin right on the first page with a mention of the time of action: “The Cossack Melekhov Prokofy returned to the farm in the last Turkish campaign ...”. But the last campaign is the Balkan War of 1877–1878. - does not fit the age of the characters (In fact, Prokofy is returning from the Crimean War of 1853–1856).
Noticing the mistake, in the 1941 edition Sholokhov corrects it to “penultimate…”, but in the notes to subsequent editions he continues to babble about the Balkan campaign of 1877.
It turns out that the “author” simply has no idea when the action of his own narrative begins. (There are many such examples, they can be found in our book “The Flower-Tatarnik. In search of the author of The Quiet Flows the Don”: from M. Sholokhov to F. Kryukov.)
Sholokhov's "borrowings" in "Quiet Don"
Most of the errors appear where borrowings from a number of memoirs (Generals Lukomsky, Denikin and Krasnov, Antonov-Ovseenko, Frenkel, Kakurin) are inserted into the text and are caused by incorrect coordination of these borrowings with the main text. The very use by writers of historical literature in works of art is a long-standing and fully justified literary practice.
But Sholokhov's case is special. Borrowings in The Quiet Don appear only from the middle of the 4th part and serve as bundles of individual storylines and episodes, covering up gaps in the narrative.
How to correlate the appearance of gross errors with the depth and reliability of the depiction of life and the historical background in the novel? For example, Sholokhov writes (ch. 2, part VI) about the Cossacks of the 12th Don Regiment, who fought with the Petliurists near Starobelsk. Nonsense. In the spring of 1918, neither the 12th regiment was recreated (there were stanitsa detachments and squads), nor any Petliurists - Ukraine was occupied and was under the complete control of the Germans. And the battles themselves took place, but after the collapse of Germany, at the end of 1918, Sholokhov, therefore, arbitrarily inserted a fragment taken from somewhere in a random place. Did he understand well the meaning of what he wrote or rewrote?
Sholokhov's borrowings introduced into the text violate the unified chronology of the narrative, Sholokhov thoughtlessly uses the dates of the borrowed texts, not paying attention to the calendar style (old or new), although the dates of the main literary text are given according to the old style! Due to this, in several cases, Sholokhov in the novel has different dates for the same event!
For example, the execution of Podtelkov in the main text is dated the second day of Easter (in 1918 - April 23, old style), and from Frenkel, the date of execution, April 28, falls into the borrowed fragment! A striking case - an insane author who does not give an account of what texts come out from under his pen!
Author and co-author
All this suggests the existence of two distinct layers of text. In the main part of the literary text, without interrupting and without breaking the unified system of images, the artistic thread of the novel stretches, capturing the reader from the first lines of the story.
The other layer is insert "chapters", fragments, episodes that play an auxiliary role and stand out noticeably from the general narrative, having absorbed most of the gross factual and chronological errors.
The logical completeness of individual fragments of the main text, the strength of the created images are based on the deep observations of the author, who knows life and people well. And his personal inner spiritual experience of understanding what is happening fuses individual episodes and chapters into an inseparable whole, creating a unique picture of the era itself.
All this has nothing to do with the ideas and knowledge of a novice writer, the author of the Don Tales, who is trying his hand at the literary field, with his indifference to the liberation struggle of the Cossacks, with political tendentiousness, rude language.
It can be confidently asserted that at least two people participated in the work on the text of The Quiet Flows the Don. At the same time, the role of one of them could only be purely external, mechanical - the role of a compiler and editor, but not the creator, not the author of the main literary text, to which the book owes world fame and recognition.
field bags
But what about Mikhail Alexandrovich himself? Sholokhov once let slip. In 1939, at the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, he clearly expressed his understanding of the process of literary creativity: “In the units of the Red Army ... we will beat the enemy ... and I dare to assure you, comrade delegates to the congress, that we will not throw field bags - we have this Japanese custom Well… not to the point. We will collect other people's bags ... because in our literary economy the contents of these bags will later come in handy. Having defeated the enemies, we will still write books about how we beat these enemies ... "
But he definitely said: "we will collect ..." and "we will write ...". That's really the language did not let lie! Whether Sholokhov let it slip by accident or on purpose, we do not know. But Sholokhov's words themselves are significant: he publicly, publicly pointed out the source of his literary "creativity" - other people's field bags.
Is it possible, based on the text of The Quiet Flows the Don, to determine the time of the author's work on it?
In the first two parts of the novel, there is not a single explicit date of any event at all; at best, one can meet one or another date of the Orthodox calendar (Protection, Easter, etc.).
For example, shortly after the wedding, Grigory Melekhov and his young wife leave "three days before the Intercession" to plow the steppe. Grigory already feels the cooling of relations with his young wife, and for contrast, as a parallel background, the author draws a picture of a sudden early cold snap: “Grigory woke up before the light. Two inches of snow lay on the zipun. The steppe languished in the shimmering virgin blueness of fresh snow...”. At the end of September, the Don steppe suddenly freezes, covered with fallen snow! What is this - an invention of the author, a metaphor?
Early snow on Pokrov is far from the only mention of certain natural phenomena in the Quiet Don. So, for example, the suicide attempt of Natalia Korshunova takes place on Holy Saturday - simultaneously with the beginning of the ice drift on the Don. And the beginning of the novel, the departure of the Cossacks to the camps in the very heat, falls on Trinity. Moreover, in each case, not only a description of the natural phenomenon is given, but also many accompanying factors are reported.
For example, snow on Pokrov is replaced by a long thaw: “For a week a south wind blew, it got warmer, the earth receded, late mossy greenery bloomed brightly in the steppe. Rostepel held on until Mikhailov's day ... ".
It turned out that the description of all natural phenomena mentioned in the text is reliable. All of them really took place: early snow on Pokrov, subsequent thaw, the beginning of ice drift on the eve of Easter, accompanied by rainy cloudy weather, heat on Trinity and rains two weeks later! But they did not take place in the years that Sholokhov's novel is traditionally dated (1912-1913), but earlier, in 1911-1912. The real events are shifted by one year, as if the last pre-war year 1913 had been cut out of the text.
The immediacy and depth of the depiction of nature by the author of The Quiet Don is such that we can not just assume in it an eyewitness of events: early snowfall, opening of the Don, stormy, overflowing spring streams in the steppe on Palm Sunday ... The pictures are alive and accurate. This means that the episodes of the first and second parts of The Quiet Flows the Don were created immediately or shortly after the events depicted: the beginning of the author’s work on the novel should be attributed to approximately 1911. Naturally, any attempts to somehow connect M.A. Sholokhov (he was then less than eight years old!) with the creation of the text of the first parts are simply out of place.
Galicia or East Prussia?
Another important observation was made when studying the military episodes of the third part of the novel. Grigory Melekhov, along with other Cossacks of his farm, is fighting the enemy in the fields of Galicia. But it turns out that there are a number of episodes in the text that deal with battles in East Prussia. "It would be better if you died somewhere in Prussia than here, in front of your mother's eyes!" - mentally reproachfully said to his brother Grigory ... "at the very beginning of the Upper Don uprising of 1919. It is surprising here that in East Prussia not one of the Cossack regiments formed in the Upper Don district fought!
Where, then, did the mention of Prussia come from in the text? Such a “bifurcation” of military episodes and jumps from the Galician version of front-line events to the East Prussian one are found in the novel in all storylines (both in Pyotr Melekhov, and in Listnitsky, and in the diary of the “unknown Cossack”) throughout almost the entire narrative.
A striking phenomenon - the claimed author, over a decade and a half of work on the novel, could not “find out” on which fronts his heroes were fighting!
And the solution to this paradox created by Sholokhov turned out to be very interesting: we are dealing with two different versions of the same text of the novel, with its two editions, which differ in the place of military service of the Cossacks of the Tatarsky farm.
The fact is that the Don had its own special system for recruiting Cossack regiments: each village sent its Cossacks to serve only in certain regiments of its district. In East Prussia, the Cossacks of another district fought, Ust-Medveditsky (where, by the way, Fyodor Kryukov was from!)
Chronologically, the East Prussian edition on the pages of the novel intersects practically with the beginning of the uprising. Or, in other words, the beginning of the uprising led the author to rework the text of The Quiet Flows the Don in such a way that the author of the novel moved his story and placed it at the epicenter of the future uprising. Such an evolution in the work on the text is possible in the only case - when the author creates his work in parallel, synchronously with the events that he describes. Consequently, most of the text of The Quiet Flows the Don - the first five parts, up to the middle of the sixth part - is based on the text of an unknown author, written before the beginning of the Veshen uprising, in any case, no later than the winter of 1919. Only this fact can explain the observed in text transitions from one version of the plot to another.
When the early edition of The Quiet Flows the Don was being created, the author did not yet know that the Veshensk uprising would break out at the end of the winter of 1919, and therefore he placed his characters in other places in accordance with his original plan.
Sholokhov, however, only mechanically, compiled the text of both author's editions, completely unaware of the fundamental differences and internal contradictions that arose in this case. It is impossible to imagine a reasonable explanation for so many "leaps" from one version of the plot to another and back, if we assume that the text of The Quiet Flows the Flows River was created in the twenties by the consistent work of only one author - Sholokhov.
Psychological trap
Today, doubts about the authorship of M. A. Sholokhov are not accepted by many writers, humanities scholars, or simply readers. Contrary to logic, common sense, numerous and varied facts and evidence, they do not want to hear anything on this topic. Why? The answer lies outside literature or science.
For such people, doubts about the authorship of Sholokhov, who was considered a classic of proletarian literature in Soviet times, mean something more than just a scientific, academic question “who wrote it?”. The falsity of the idol that was worshiped, under the shadow of which one lived for many years, leads to a reassessment of one's own life, the principles on which it was built.
They are not defending Sholokhov, but themselves, their right to be unscrupulous and conformist.
Recently, in Rostov, the son of a Nobel laureate published an important and previously unknown document - a letter from M.A. Sholokhov dated March 23, 1929.
It mentions for the first time the meeting between Sholokhov and Stalin on March 21, during which the leader finally secured the authorship of The Quiet Flows the Don for the young proletarian writer. Stalin, obviously, dictated the letter of the “proletarian writers”, which silenced all skeptics for many decades with the threat of criminal prosecution. And there were plenty of skeptics in those distant years.
“The writers from the Forge, Berezovsky, Nikiforov, Gladkov, Malyshkin, Sannikov, and others,” writes Sholokhov in his letter, “people with a bastard soul sow these rumors and have the audacity to publicly make statements of this kind. This is all I can talk about everywhere and everywhere…”
The “defenders of Sholokhov” accused those who tried to understand the mysteries of our Soviet past for many mortal sins. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example, is simply envying the Nobel laureate. And now it turned out that Alexander Isaevich simply restored in 1974 the tradition of proletarian writers of 1928 - "to make public statements of this kind."
But the current defenders of Sholokhov - their name is legion - continue in our time a tradition of a different kind.
Literature is becoming increasingly difficult for many modern schoolchildren. How to read four volumes of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" or about the same volume of Sholokhov's "Quiet Flows the Don" in the era of gadgets. Although, perhaps, it is these works that reflect the Russian national character in the best possible way.
Russia Day is celebrated just this long weekend. And this is an occasion to talk about the mystery of the Quiet Flows the Don. Who really wrote this book? The dispute about authorship haunted the Nobel laureate Sholokhov all his life, and it does not subside even today. The correspondent of the MIR 24 TV channel Roman Galperin tried to reveal the secret.
Stanitsa. It is unlikely that anyone would have known about this Cossack village on the outskirts of the Rostov region if it were not for the Quiet Don. The novel brought world fame to its author Mikhail Sholokhov.
In the very center of the village on the banks of the Don there is a monument to the heroes of the "Quiet Don" Gregory and. Initially, the sculptural composition was located in Rostov-on-Don, but more than 20 years ago it was moved here, to Sholokhov's small homeland.
The triumph of Russian literature. Sholokhov is awarded the Nobel Prize. But behind this success all these years was hidden the real tragedy of one of the main Soviet writers. After the publication of the first two volumes in the October magazine in 1929, Sholokhov was accused of plagiarism.
“This story could not have happened. And since 1929, with periodicity, it has been repeated in different versions in the thaw, then in perestroika, - said Natalia Kornienko, head of the department of the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
And to whom they just did not attribute. It was believed that Sholokhov appropriated the manuscript of a white officer shot by the Bolsheviks. According to another version, the draft of The Quiet Flows the Don was brought from the Civil War by Mikhail Alexandrovich's father-in-law. Later, the name of the Cossack writer and member of the White movement Fyodor Kryukov appeared. This version was followed by and. Alexander Isaevich was not embarrassed that, according to the documents, Kryukov died in 1920 from typhus.
“For Solzhenitsyn, this happened because of writer's envy. He wanted to write a big novel about the revolution. But he cannot write better than Sholokhov. He had envy. He could not create such an image,” explained publicist, teacher, historian Roy Medvedev.
“I do not need to do research that Kryukov could not write. This is a completely different prose. She is different in her attitude, intonation and talent,” said Galina Vorontsova, senior researcher at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Veniamin Krasnushkin, a Don writer who worked under the pseudonym Viktor Sevsky, was also appointed the author. His "Quiet Flows the Don", assures the Russian-Israeli literary critic Zeev Bar-Sella, was found by Soviet Chekists and published under the authorship of Sholokhov.
“It was he, and no one else, who began remaking the novel into a more Soviet one. Sevsky took a sharply Bolshevik position. And he was on the side of the whites. This is also seen in the novel. Everything is described by the whites,” said Zeev Bar-Sella, a linguist-researcher, Israeli literary critic, publicist and journalist.
Bar-Sella is perhaps the author of the most. He assures that Sholokhov did not write a single work. “Quiet Flows the Don”, “Virgin Soil Upturned”, “They Fought for the Motherland” was written by other writers. And Sholokhov is a project of Soviet Chekists.
“Russian literature is great. It was necessary to show something commensurate with the achievements and come from the Soviet Union. The OGPU solved urgent problems. It was necessary now to show cultural achievements. They showed,” the researcher believes.
The writer had connections with the Chekists, confirms Sholokhov's grandson Alexander Mikhailovich. Indeed, they are completely opposite. The secret services planned to get rid of him. Saved personally by Comrade Stalin. But in disputes within the writers' brethren, the patronage of the leader did not help. Until the end of his days, Sholokhov was accused of literary theft.
“The arguments come down to a very small circle. He was unusually young. One of the Soviet writers of the 1920s said, if I could not write such a thing, then how could he. Such envy,” says Alexander Sholokhov, grandson of Mikhail Sholokhov.
The second reason is education. The official biography says that Sholokhov graduated from only four classes of the gymnasium. But - one of the most complex novels in world literature. Dozens of storylines. Colossal time frames. The action takes place during the First World War, the October Revolution and the Civil War, which divided the Cossacks into Reds and Whites. Critics assured: well, an illiterate person could not write such a tricky work. Yes, both the appearance and behavior of Sholokhov suggested thoughts.
During the Soviet years, Roy Medvedev was one of Sholokhov's main opponents. A well-known publicist doubted the authorship of The Quiet Flows the Don. It's the writer's fault. He, in modern terms, was out of the crowd, did not communicate with his brothers in writing. He lived not in Moscow, but in distant Veshenskaya.
“Sholokhov himself retained neither talent nor genius. He was arrested by the drunken police. He was an alcoholic,” said the publicist, writer-historian Roy Medvedev.
Sholokhov tried not to respond to the attacks. Only once he turned to the party newspaper Pravda. Lenin's sister Maria Ulyanova organized the commission. Experts called the accusations against Sholokhov malicious slander. The writer himself explained everything simply.
“I was young then. Worked with rage. The impressions were fresh, and the best years of growing up were given to him. Adolescent look is the best. He will see everything, ”said Sholokhov.
For a long time, the main trump card was the lack of a manuscript of the novel. In 1999, she was found. Today it is kept at the Institute of World Literature. The manuscript contains 885 pages 605 written by Sholokhov. Three examinations were carried out. And here is the conclusion that there is no doubt that the textual study of this manuscript allows us to solve the problem of the authorship of The Quiet Flows the Don.
But even after that, the issue was not put to rest. Most literary scholars are sure that the theme of the authorship of The Quiet Flows the Don is eternal. This is no longer a dispute about literature, but about politics, which will arise at every turning point in Russian history.
Who wrote "Quiet Flows the Don"? [Chronicle of literary investigation] Kolodny Lev Efimovich
"Quiet Don" - the end of the myth
"Quiet Don" - the end of the myth
In Moscow, L. E. Kolodny seems to have finally put an end to the constant claims that the Nobel Prize winner Sholokhov is a plagiarist.
Mikhail Sholokhov was born in 1905 and published two collections of short stories in 1925 and 1926. At the end of 1925, Sholokhov began working on his masterpiece, The Quiet Flows the Don. The first two books of the novel appeared in 1928 and caused a sensation. The work gave a complete picture of the life of the Cossacks before the First World War, traced the fate of the most loyal elements of the tsarist army. The composition ended with a tragic clash of whites and reds on the Don.
Almost at the same time, some members of the Moscow intelligentsia wondered if such a work could have come from the pen of a young man whose school education was interrupted by the revolution at 13? Rumors of plagiarism began to spread. A specially appointed commission considered the essence of the issue. The commission was headed by a veteran of Soviet literature writer A. Serafimovich. Members of the commission looked through the manuscript that Sholokhov brought to Moscow - about a thousand pages written by his hand. To their delight, they stated that there was no reason to accuse the author of plagiarism.
The third book of The Quiet Flows the Don met with great difficulties when it appeared in print. This part of the novel tells mainly about the Cossack uprisings against Soviet power in 1919. The young Cossacks were not essentially white, but they took up arms in the face of unprecedented repression that the Bolsheviks unleashed on their villages, raping women, passing countless sentences on innocent victims.
At that most critical moment in the civil war, the communist advance to the south was halted. Thirty thousand of the best Russian Cossack soldiers took up arms to hold back the advance of the Red Army to the Don, in this important region. Sholokhov experienced all these events himself, as a child. In the twenties, he talked a lot with former rebels, especially with one of the leaders of the Cossack uprising against the Soviet regime - Kharlampy Yermakov, who became the prototype of the protagonist of the work - Grigory Melekhov.
Sholokhov showed the excesses of Soviet politics in the novel and was forced to fight with conservative editors for the right to publish what he wrote. In 1929, he went on to publish the novel in the ultra-Orthodox magazine October. But this publication was suspended after the appearance of the 12th chapter. E. G. Levitskaya, a friend of Sholokhov, convinced Stalin not to make cuts in the novel, which the editors insisted on (M. Gorky and M. Sholokhov himself convinced Stalin of this. - Note. ed.). Apparently, Stalin heeded her arguments. And thanks to Stalin's consent, the end of the third book was published in the journal in 1932. The third book came out the following year.
Kolodny recently showed that the reason for the delay in publication, which fell to the lot of the fourth book, was mainly the opinion of Stalin's entourage that Melekhov, in accordance with the laws of socialist realism, should have become a communist. Sholokhov did not give up his point of view, saying that this was a falsification of the philosophy of his protagonist.
The chapters of the last, fourth book of the novel began to be published in 1937. Quiet Flows the Don was not fully published until 1940.
Sholokhov lived in a small town in the central part of the Don. In fairness, it must be said that in the 30s the writer repeatedly risked his life, during the years of repression, protecting local leaders from an unjust trial. But in the post-war years, he began to enjoy notoriety for attacks on dissident writers, in particular, Sinyavsky and Daniel, who ended up in the dock. Because of this, Sholokhov was rejected by most of the Russian public. The old accusations of plagiarism were revived in 1974 in connection with the publication in Paris of an anonymous monograph entitled The Stirrup of the Quiet Don. It put forward the point of view that the work was mainly written by the white Cossack officer writer Fyodor Kryukov. A. Solzhenitsyn wrote a preface to this book he published. The cloud of accusation began to grow again due to the support of this point of view by other writers, in particular, Roy Medvedev. The authorship of Kryukov, however, was rejected by Geir Hetso, who computerized the Quiet Flows the Don and unequivocally established that the creator of the entire work was Sholokhov. The potential scandal, however, looked too attractive to be left alone. And until now, some researchers are practicing alternative theories: one of them, for example, was promoted for a long time on Leningrad television.
Kolodny gave a resolute rebuff to such speculations, inflicted, as the French say, "coup de grace", that is, the last blow of the executioner, depriving the condemned of life, by publishing several original manuscripts of Mikhail Sholokhov. Kolodny made public the fact that 646 pages of unknown early manuscripts are in one of the private archives. On some pages there are dates marked by Sholokhov's hand, starting with "autumn 1925". In March 1927, the author calculated that the first part by that time contained 140 thousand printed characters, which averaged three printed sheets of text. The drafts are of exceptional interest not only because they prove the authorship of Sholokhov, but also because they shed light on the implementation of his plans, the technology of creativity. The author originally intended to describe the execution of the Bolsheviks Podtelkov and Krivoshlykov in 1919. But in order to give readers an idea of who the Cossacks were, he considered it necessary to start the story with the events of 1912, to show life as it was during the days of the former regime.
Sholokhov made a large number of corrections in the text, replacing not only individual words and phrases, but also rewriting entire chapters.
Initially, the first book began with the departure of Pyotr Melekhov for military training in the camp. Thanks to the manuscripts, it is clear that the writer then decided to start the chronicle with a description of the murder of the Turkish grandmother Grigory Melekhov by the Cossacks. In an early manuscript, the author left the surname of the prototype Ermakov behind the main character, although he changed his name Kharlampy to Abram. After Abram Ermakov killed the first German soldier, he became disgusted with the war. This scene did not remain in the novel, but finds a parallel in the final text of The Quiet Flows the Don, in the first book, third part, chapter V, where Grigory slashes an Austrian soldier with a saber.
On February 4, 1992, Moskovskaya Pravda published the unknown 24th chapter of The Quiet Don, which describes Grigory's wedding night. This scene contrasts sharply with his previous love affairs, especially with the Cossack woman whom he raped. She was a virgin. Surprisingly, the author himself removed this scene, since it diverged from the general line of the work, where Gregory appears noble, in contrast to the atrocious colleagues surrounding him.
Today, with accusations of plagiarism firmly under control, we can hope that early versions of The Quiet Flows the Flows River will be able to be published.
Kolodny L. Here it is, the manuscript of The Quiet Flows the Don (with the conclusion of the forensic expert, handwriting expert Yu. N. Pogibko) // Moskovsky Pravda, May 25, 1991.
Kolodny L. Manuscripts of the Quiet Flows the Don // Moscow. No. 10. 1991
Kolodny L. Manuscripts of the Quiet Don. Autographed by Sholokhov // Rabochaya gazeta, October 4, 1991.
Kolodny L. Who will publish my Quiet Flows the Don? // Book Review, 1991, No. 12.
Kolodny L. Unknown "Quiet Don" (with the publication of the first, early version of "Quiet Don", part 1, chapter 24) // Moskovskaya Pravda, February 4, 1992.
Manuscripts of the "Quiet Don" // Questions of Literature, No. 1, 1993
Black drafts // Questions of Literature, No. 6., 1994
Brian Murphy, Professor (England)
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