And Quiet Flows the Don
고요한 돈강
Mikhail Sholokhov's four-volume epic novel (1928-1940). The Don Cossack Grigory Melekhov moves back and forth between Reds and Whites through the First World War, revolution and civil war until he has lost everything. It won a Stalin Prize in 1941, and Sholokhov received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. Suspicions of plagiarism followed it for decades, but manuscripts found later and statistical analyses support his authorship.
In depth
What is the story?
The novel opens like a legend in the Don village of Tatarsky. Prokofy Melekhov comes home from the Turkish war with a Turkish wife; the Cossacks try to lynch her as a witch and he draws his sabre. She dies that evening and only the baby survives. That child's son is the hero: Grigory Melekhov, with his Turkish grandmother's looks.
Grigory carries on openly with Aksinya, the wife of his neighbour Stepan. To break it off the family marries him to Natalya Korshunova, but he tells his father "I did not marry, you married me off," and leaves with Aksinya to work on a landowner's estate. In despair Natalya cuts her own throat with a scythe, and survives.
War comes in 1914 and Grigory becomes a decorated hero, a holder of the St George Cross. But the revolution leaves him unable to tell where he stands. He fights with the Red Guards, then sickens when Podtyolkov massacres the captured Chernetsov. In late 1918 the Reds enter the village amid rumours of shootings of former officers. He hides, and in the spring of 1919, when the Veshenskaya uprising breaks out, he becomes a rebel divisional commander. His brother Pyotr is killed by Mishka Koshevoy, a village friend gone over to the Bolsheviks. Grigory no longer wants to spare prisoners, and victory drags him into drink.
The whole family goes down. His sister-in-law Darya shoots a captured Communist herself and receives a medal, then falls ill and drowns herself in the Don; Natalya dies of a botched abortion; his father dies of typhus in flight. Koshevoy, who killed Pyotr, comes back to marry Grigory's sister and chair the village revolutionary committee. Grigory, returning from service in Budyonny's cavalry, finds no place left for him. Hunted, he joins Fomin's band, escapes it, and secretly runs off with Aksinya, but on the banks of the Chir she is shot by a grain-requisitioning detachment. After wandering the steppe he throws his rifle and revolver into the river and goes home to meet his son Mishatka. There the novel stops, without saying what will happen to him.
Why is it so famous?
Because its hero is not on the side of the revolution. Melekhov is never reborn a Bolshevik, and Sholokhov records the cruelty on both sides: the gang rape of a Polish maid by Cossacks, the killing of prisoners, the punitive detachments of Reds and Whites. Soviet critics therefore suspected a hidden sympathy for the Whites, while the emigres Khodasevich and Berberova defended him from those attacks. It is a rare way to see the civil war on the Don through Cossack eyes, and that setting touches directly on decossackization.
How did it get published?
Sholokhov began in 1925, gave up, and started afresh in Veshenskaya in November 1926. The first books ran in the journal Oktyabr from 1928. The crisis came with the third book, which depicts the Veshenskaya uprising. Serialisation stopped in spring 1929, usually explained as a political decision by the editors, though the scholar Herman Ermolaev, citing Sholokhov's letters, holds that he simply had not finished the continuation. The real clash came later: the editors would not take the manuscript, even when Gorky recommended printing it uncut. By Sholokhov's own account Stalin told him at Gorky's dacha in July 1931 that the third book "works for us, for the revolution", and serialisation resumed in January 1932. Along the way Sholokhov made changes that showed the Reds in a better light and shifted the conflict towards class, and the 1933 edition censored the earlier books as well.
The last book was written amid the Great Terror. Sholokhov complained to Stalin that he had barely written half a book in five years. Learning that the Rostov NKVD was building a case with him as leader of a coming Cossack rising, he rushed to Moscow, saw Stalin and, at a hearing attended by Politburo members and Yezhov, showed it to be a provocation. The novel was finished in 1940.
Did Sholokhov really write it?
This is the longest quarrel over the book. Rumours of plagiarism were already spreading in 1929: how could a beginner of about twenty-two write so mature a novel so fast? The Cossack writer Fyodor Kryukov is the name most often proposed. On 29 March 1929 Pravda ran a letter from Serafimovich, Fadeyev and others defending him. Solzhenitsyn later openly voiced the suspicion, arguing that Sholokhov never again reached that height.
The established evidence points the other way. Geir Kjetsaa's 1984 computer study found no plagiarism. In 1999 the first two books' manuscripts, thought lost, were found and examined, and a facsimile appeared in 2005. Nils Hjort's sentence-length statistics (2007), Sergei Nikolayev's dialect comparison (2016) and the stylometry of Boris Orekhov and Natalya Velikanova (2019) all support Sholokhov. Some researchers still doubt it, but that remains suspicion, while the evidence lies with him. The argument from age also weakens in context: Fadeyev and Babel too wrote their best-known books young.
On screen?
Screen versions: Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ivan Pravov (1930), Sergei Gerasimov (1958), Sergei Bondarchuk (2006) and Sergei Ursulyak (2015). The first English translation appeared in 1934.