Mikhail
Sholokhov
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, (b.
May 24 [May 11, Old Style], 1905,
Veshenskaya, Russia—d. Feb. 21, 1984,
Veshenskaya, Russian S.F.S.R.,
U.S.S.R.), Russian novelist, winner of
the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature for
his novels and stories about the
Cossacks of southern Russia.
After joining the Red Army in 1920 and
spending two years in Moscow, he
returned in 1924 to his native Cossack
village in the Don region of southern
Russia. He made several trips to western
Europe and in 1959 accompanied the
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to the
United States. He joined the Communist
Party in 1932 and became a member of the
Central Committee in 1961.
Sholokhov began writing at 17, his first
published book being Donskie rasskazy
(1926; Tales of the Don), a collection
of short stories. In 1925 he began his
famous novel Tikhy Don (“The Silent
Don”). Sholokhov’s work evolved slowly:
it took him 12 years to publish Tikhy
Don (4 vol., 1928–40; translated in two
parts as And Quiet Flows the Don and The
Don Flows Home to the Sea) and 28 years
to complete another major novel,
Podnyataya tselina (1932–60; translated
in two parts as Virgin Soil Upturned
[also published as Seeds of Tomorrow]
and Harvest on the Don). Oni Srazhalis
za rodinu (1942; They Fought for Their
Country) is an unfinished epic tale of
the Soviet people’s bravery during the
German invasion of World War II.
Sholokhov’s popular story “Sudba
cheloveka” (1957; “The Fate of a Man”)
also focused on this period.
Sholokhov’s best-known work, Tikhy Don,
is remarkable for the objectivity of its
portrayal of the heroic and tragic
struggle of the Don Cossacks against the
Bolsheviks for independence. It became
the most widely read novel in the Soviet
Union and was heralded as a powerful
example of Socialist Realism, winning
the Stalin Prize in 1941.
Sholokhov was one of the most enigmatic
Soviet writers. In letters he wrote to
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, he boldly
defended compatriots from the Don
region, yet he approved the sentencing
that followed the convictions of the
writers Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel
on subversion charges in 1966 and the
persecution of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Stalin’s view that Tikhy Don contained
errors was public knowledge, but the
novel remained a classic of Soviet
literature throughout Stalin’s rule. The
artistic merits of Sholokhov’s best
novel are in such stark contrast with
the mediocre (or worse) quality of the
rest of his work that questions have
been raised about Sholokhov’s authorship
of Tikhy Don. Many authors, among them
Solzhenitsyn, publicly accused Sholokhov
of plagiarism and claimed that the novel
was a reworking of another writer’s
manuscript; Fyodor Kryukov, a writer
from the Don region who died in 1920, is
most often cited as Sholokhov’s source.
Though a group of Norwegian literary
scholars—using statistical analysis of
the novel’s language—proved its affinity
with the rest of Sholokhov’s oeuvre and
despite the recovery of the novel’s
early manuscript, which had been
believed lost, a considerable number of
authoritative literary figures in Russia
today believe that the novel was
plagiarized.
