p What is Sholokhov? It is like asking the skin divers who move about freely on the seabed, what is the sea? On the outside it is a boundless expanse of loudly seething blue waves. Distant horizons, sailing ships, a call to the unknown. But those who open their eyes under water see a strange, mysterious world of slowly swimming fish and fantastic plants, a world that may even seem a bit frightening. So it is with Sholokhov. He is Russia seen both in the movement of her elements and in the collision of her characters.

p Sholokhov is not a chronicler of the Don Cossacks. He is a Cossack himself, he writes mainly about Cossacks but in doing so paints a comprehensive picture of Russia.

p Hundreds of articles in all the languages, and dozens of books and monographs have been written about Sholokhov. His fascination lies in his marvellous, full-blooded realism, in his ability to bring out the human side of the great theme of our age—the conversion of the bulk of the working people to socialism. Under Sholokhov’s pen this theme becomes so strikingly picturesque and dramatic because the heroes are the Don Cossacks whose inherited prejudices connected with their special position as an estate apart in Russian society hampered their historical transition to socialism. This is what Sholokhov writes about in his two major works And Quiet Flows the Don and Virgin Soil Upturned, moulding his characters with such poetic, Tolstoyan eloquence, and giving such a truthful description of the road they had to travel to arrive at revolution, that his name became known throughout the world.

p Mikhail Sholokhov was born in 1905. His father was a clerk, then a cattle dealer, and later manager of a steam mill. The future writer gathered his impressions of the Cossack kulaks (rich peasants), officers and the rest of the Cossack elite, at the house of the mill owner (the prototype of Mokhov in And Quiet Flows the Don). Sholokhov left school in 1918 when he was thirteen years old. He began to write at the age of eighteen, publishing his stories in Komsomol newspapers and magazines. His first book Tales of the Don came out in 1926. He started his And Quiet Flows the Don in 1925 (the first and second parts came out in 1928, the third in 1932, and the fourth in 1937-38.) The first part of Virgin Soil Upturned was published in 1932, and the second thirty years later.

p In Tales of the Don and Azure Steppe his chief aim was to chronicle the story of the Don Cossacks in the period of the Civil War and the NEP. Actually these books were but an introduction to the monumental epic novel And Quiet Flows the Don which embraces a period of several decades and is the first such book about the Cossacks in Russian literature. And Quiet Flows the Don is a sort of Cossack encyclopaedia describing the Cossacks’ mores and manners, customs and songs, their life in peacetime, their participation in World War I, and their reaction to the Revolution of October 1917 and subsequent events.

p It is a panoramic novel, packed with events and characters. The plot centres round the Melekhovs, a family of well-to-do Cossack farmers. The author begins by introducing us to the Cossack world with its tradition-bound way of life. As the plot develops, he takes us into the homes of Cossacks of different social standing: paupers like Mishka Koshevoi, the wealthy mill owner Mokhov, ataman 202 Korshunov whose daughter Natalya marries Grigory Melekhov, and others. Descriptions of the clothes and household utensils, of mowing, ploughing and fishing, of wedding customs and genre scenes, are the background for Sholokhov’s extraordinarily colourful heroes. There is the Melekhov family: Grigory’s father, Pantelei Prokofievich, a harsh and quick-tempered man, an old tsarist campaigner and a pillar of Cossack traditions; his mother Ilyinichna; his brother Pyotr—a burly Cossack with a wheat-coloured moustache; and Pyotr’s wife, the flirtatious Darya. Then there are the Astakhovs, their next-door neighbours: Stepan and his wife Aksinya, a handsome passionate woman. Aksinya and Grigory fall passionately in love, and in this love both find an outlet for their unconscious protest against the Cossacks’ moral and caste prejudices.

p Sholokhov shows the collision between humane concepts and the old and obsolete notions of honour, religion, family and social duty, the purpose of the Cossacks’ life and the position of women. Grigory’s affair with Aksinya, another man’s wife, resulting in his leaving home and becoming a hired labourer in the service of a local landowner, was the first jolt that shook his faith in the Cossack moral principles.

p Sholokhov draws a fascinating picture of the contradictory relations between his heroes—Grigory, Natalya, Pyotr, Darya and Pantelei Prokofievich. His skilful use of shading enhances the reality of his characters and makes their relations more dramatic. For instance, when Grigory is promoted by the Whites to division commander, his father Pantelei Prokofievich, the head of the family but only a sergeant in rank, feels constrained and “somehow estranged from Grigory".

p When the Cossacks enter the war the story spreads beyond the bounds of family relations and acquires vast scope, with new characters appearing against a much broader background. The second part of And Quiet Flows the Don gives a detailed account of the military and revolutionary history of the Cossack movement and of the political events in Russia in 1916-18. Sholokhov shows us the most prominent leaders of the counter-revolution: General Kornilov, Alexeyev, the Cossack atamans Kaledin and Bogayevsky, and the revolutionary Cossack leaders Podtyolkov and Krivoshlykov. He describes the story of the Podtyolkov movement, the death of Podtyolkov himself, and the vacillations of the Don Cossacks.

p In parts 3 and 4 the plot deals mainly with the course of the Civil War in the Don country (1918-20), and particularly with the upper-Don revolt against Soviet power. Sholokhov has described this last revolt of the Cossacks on the basis of documentary material and the accounts of eyewitnesses, interviewed by him personally. The Melekhovs—father and both sons—play a prominent part in this 203 revolt. Pyotr is killed; Grigory is given command of a regiment and then rises to division commander. Sholokhov shows how Cossack nationalism was unable to withstand the conflict with historical reality, how groundless the Cossacks’ fears that “landless, peasant and factory Russia" intended to seize the rich Don territory proved, how their enmity lost intensity and the workingmen’s, humane instincts in them gradually took the upper hand and they felt drawn to the opposite—to the Soviets, to Mishka Koshevoi and the Bolsheviks.

p The author uses the career of Grigory Melekhov as a means of demonstrating all these dramatic processes. This “wild, handsome Cossack" whom Sholokhov frankly admires at moments, does not quite represent the true destinies of the middle peasants. In tsarist Russia, a man belonging to the middle peasantry could hardly have been promoted to general in the White army. With the Cossacks it was a different matter. But psychologically, Grigory Melekhov is a typical representative of the middle peasantry. With great artistic skill and power of conviction the author sums up the dozens of reasons which guide Grigory in his behaviour, directing him this way and that. When he was in hospital, recuperating after being wounded, Grigory spoke with Garanzha, a revolutionary soldier, who did not mince his words in defining the war: “It’s more money for the rich, and a tighter noose round our necks.” But when Grigory returned home with a cross of St. George, once again “the subtle poison of flattery, deference and admiration gradually destroyed those seeds of truth planted in his mind by Garanzha. When he left home again, he was not the man who had come there from the front. His Cossack pride, imbibed with his mother’s milk, took the upper hand over the great human truth.” His emotional development was extremely tortuous. “And because he stood on the dividing line in the struggle between the two worlds, both of which he denounced, a dull, unceasing resentment mounted in his soul.” His arrival at the truth was painful, it was indeed born in hard travail. He says to his wife Natalya who calls him to shame for his drinking and his carrying on with merry widows and loose wenches at the other farmsteads: “What shame can there be when our whole life’s gone awry. . . . It’s hard. . . . It’s hard, and that’s why I try to find forgetfulness in vodka, or some woman, never mind which. . . . Life’s taken a wrong course, and maybe I’m to blame. ... I ought to have made peace with the Reds and gone after the Cadets. But how do it? Who’ll act as go-between between us and Soviet power? How can we settle our wrongs? Half of the Cossacks are on the other side of the Donets, and the ones who’ve stayed here have turned savage, they’ve got their teeth in their land.... Everything’s got mixed up in my head, Natasha. The 204 war’s taken everything out of me. I seem frightening to my own self now.”. . . . “My hair’s turned grey, I’m losing grip on everything. . . . Life has flashed past like summer lightning.”

p A lyrical motif of all-conquering life runs through the whole book—through the history of the Cossacks and the story of Grigory Melekhov who arrives at socialism the hard way, going through the crucible of wars and the sharp contradictions of the epoch. This is the leitmotif of the whole novel. But it sounds most strongly in Sholokhov’s description of the steppeland. Knave, a friend of Mishka Koshevoi’s, who has been executed by the Whites, is buried in the steppe. Very soon a bustard hen builds a nest on his grave, and life begins to seethe all round again.People are waging their great struggle for happiness on this land, and the land calls them with its beauty and poetry, urging them to win their rightful cause. “Invisible life, fecundated by the Spring, throbbing and pulsating mightily, was unfolding in the steppe: grasses, hidden from the predatory eyes of men, were growing lustily; birds and beasts, big and small, mated in their secret steppeland havens; and the fields bristled with the countless spikes of the new shoots.”

p This must not be mistaken for the Knut Hamsun pantheistic approach of Nature reconciling people with the power of its beauty which remains utterly indifferent to everything. Sholokhov’s landscape lyricism and his hymnal attitude to life and living things are inseparable from his love for the people. The poetry of all that is beautiful and strong (both in the colourful descriptions of the landscape and in the human passions) conveyed by Sholokhov with such truly Tolstoyan evocative power, merely serves to stress the humanity that is the mission of the true Human Being. Since Gorky no Russian author (with the exception of Fadeyev) has written as affectionately as Sholokhov of toilers, and especially of women and the joys and sorrows of motherhood. His rich, strong realism takes the tone of a calmly objective narration. There is nothing frankly tendentious about the novel, but the author’s attitude is obvious from the sum of his images, and is as natural as life itself.

p Sholokhov revised his And Quiet Flows the Don several times. In one of the editions he deleted the more naturalistic scenes and toned down the naturalistic colours of the language, but later he restored it all.

p True, there is a certain amount of Zola-ism in Sholokhov’s style, and this is perhaps its weakness. I feel that in Sergei Gerasimov’s film And Quiet Flows the Don this naturalism was unwittingly emphasised and the poetry we read between the lines of the novel has largely been lost.

p Sholokhov has his own colours, startlingly bold and truthful. The last book where he describes Grigory Melekhov’s experience in 205 Fomin’s insurgent band is fascinating for its psychological revelations. Sholokhov’s province in which he really comes into his own is human feelings and relationships. When Aksinya dies, hit by a stray bullet, Grigory lifts his face up to the sky and the sun blinds him, but strangely it looks black to him. A “black sun": I do not know of another image in world literature to equal this in depth and power.

p And Quiet Flows the Don (just like Alexei Tolstoi’s The Ordeal and Peter the First} is one of the classics of Soviet literature. It is a tragic epic of the age, a book of love and anger. Reflected in it, like the stormy skies in a broad river, is that period in the history of Russia when human destinies clashed and the beautiful got mixed up with the sordid, all of which taken together carries the reader to distant shores whose outlines have been conjured up by the Revolution in the mind of every Russian. And Quiet Flows the Don is a truly great novel of the zoth century, a new Iliad of the people and Revolution.

p Sholokhov’s second great novel, Virgin Soil Upturned, deals with the events of the winter of 1929-30, a decisive turning point in the collectivisation of agriculture.

p The novel recreates with almost documentary accuracy all the more typical attending circumstances. Although, as in And Quiet Flows the Don, the scene is set in a Cossack village (near Veshenskaya once again), the author has pushed into the background all that is typically Cossack in his heroes and has, on the contrary, emphasised features common to the peasantry as a whole. Virgin Soil Upturned describes the arrival of Semyon Davydov, a worker from the Leningrad Putilov Plant, one of the twenty-five thousand workers mobilised to help the agricultural districts consolidate the collective-farm system. Sholokhov describes clandestine gatherings of the opposition, the dispossession of the kulaks, meetings at the District Party Committees and village Soviets, cases of extremes to which the policy was carried, the collectivisation of all livestock (including chickens), the mutiny of the village wives, the kulaks’ preparations for a revolt, and the first sowing campaign in that “Bolshevik spring" of 1930.

p The main characters of the novel are very typical figures. The two opposite extremes are Davydov, an industrial worker, and Polovtsev, a Cossack captain. Each represents his class, fighting a battle to the death over collectivisation. The story opens with these two men’s arrival at the village of Gremyachy Log. Davydov has been sent there by the Party to direct the campaign for collectivisation. Polovtsev arrives secretly and hides out at the home of Ostrovnoi with whom he once served in the same regiment and who, although really a kulak, has been clever enough to “play along" with events, and manages to pull the wool over Davydov’s eyes so 206 successfully that, completely taken in, he even makes him property manager of the collective farm. The purpose of Polovtsev’s coming is to sabotage the work through Ostrovnoi and demoralise the collective farm. The social types of Cossack-peasants are painted with amazing vividness. Razmyotnov, the chairman of the village Soviet, a man of poor peasant origin, is susceptible to bad influence, but the instincts of a working man prove the stronger in him and he becomes Davydov’s most reliable right-hand man. Makar Nagulnov, secretary of the village Party cell, is an “extremist” type. He was a partisan in the Civil War, and he says: “We grew attached to the Party not with our learned gristle, like Trotsky, but with our hearts and the blood we shed for the Party.” He is like a tense wire, about to snap. Real or imagined enemies make his blood boil. “I’ve been breathing easier since I heard that all the farmers’ property has got to be drawn into collective farms. I’ve hated it since I was a kid.” In Nagulnov this fanatical hatred for property is combined with equally fanatical devotion to the cause of the Revolution. “The whole of me’s aimed at a world revolution,” he says.

p Kondrat Maidannikov is one of the most striking characters in Virgin Soil Upturned. He is a middle peasant, and a thrifty farmer. Sholokhov writes: “It was no easy thing for Kondrat to accept the collective farm idea. He wept and bled as he tore the umbilical cord that bound him to his property, to the oxen and his private plot of land.” Kondrat comes into the cowshed in the middle of the night to say goodbye to his animals who are to be taken to the collective farm in the morning. It is a moving scene. His oxen, after their morning watering “turned homeward, but Kondrat in a fit of fury rode at them on his horse, barring their way and heading them off to the village Soviet.” When Kondrat joined the collective farm he became a zealous, conscientious guardian of its property. Sholokhov uses Maidannikov as an example to show the international revolutionary significance of the collective-farm policy. As soon as he accepted socialism the great wide world unfolded before him. To use the words of Gogol: “Suddenly he could see very far away, to all the corners of the earth.” And Sholokhov says: “Kondrat was thinking of the needs of the country, launched on its first five-year plan, he clenched his fists under his homespun coat, and mentally said with hatred to those workers in the West who were not for the Communists: ’You’ve sold us for a good wage from your masters! You’ve bartered us for a well-fed life, brothers. . . . Or can’t you see from across the frontier how difficult it is for us to raise our economy? Can’t you see the need we’re suffering, that we’re practically barefooted and unclothed, yet we grit our teeth and work. You’ll feel ashamed of yourselves afterwards, brothers.”

p Another extremely vivid character and a most humorous one is old Grandad Shchukar.

p Yakov Ostrovnoi who lived “a queer, double life" is a very important figure in the enemy camp. He is a clever, energetic manager by nature, but because of his hatred for the collectivefarm system and the Bolsheviks, he uses these qualities for slyly calculated sabotage.

p The soul of the novel is Semyon Davydov. Like Levinson in Fadeyev’s The Rout he embodies the historical role of the proletariat in the Revolution. He is an experienced fighter in the class struggle for socialism. He is a friend and teacher of the workers and peasants, and a force as hard and unbending as steel when it comes to dealing with the enemy, the kulaks. Davydov is assaulted by some farm women whom the kulaks have egged on to loot the public seed stores. During a meeting he calls after the unsuccessful “mutiny”, he says to one of the women: “Don’t be scared, remove the scarf from your face, no one’s going to touch you, even though you did lay me about pretty hard last night. But if you do a bad job of work when we go out to sow tomorrow, I’ll give you one hell of a flogging then, so just bear it in mind. And I’m not going to strike you across the shoulder blades, but much lower down so you can’t sit on it or lie down, damn you.” The very fact that Davydov forgives these deluded women and jokes about it shows how well he understands them and how well he appreciates their kinship to himself and the cause he serves. And yet this same Davydov flies into a rage when Razmyotnov spares the kulaks because of their children. “Staring hard into Razmyotnov’s face and breathing hard Davydov said: ’So you’re sorry for them. . . . And were they sorry for us? Did the tears of our children make the enemy weep? Did they weep over the orphans of the men they’d killed? Did they? My father was discharged from the factory after the strike and exiled to Siberia. . . . Mother was left with the four of us on her hands. . . . She went begging in the streets, my mother did, so we wouldn’t die from hunger!’ "

p Both Virgin Soil Upturned and And Quiet Flows the Don abound in dramatic episodes (for instance, the murder of a poor peasant by Polovtsev, the dispossession of the kulaks, etc.) and some of them are naturalistic in colouring. But in Virgin Soil Upturned the leitmotif is the restrained lyrical pathos of man, the pathos of great human ideals. “Gazing about the infinite, newly green steppe Davydov was thinking: ’They’re going to be a happy lot. . . . Machines will be doing all the hard work. . . . People will forget the very smell of sweat.... I’d like to live till then, dammit.’ "

p There are some attractive female characters in the novel. One is Lushka, a wild and reckless but intelligent young woman who was 208 Nagulnov’s wife and then became Davydov’s mistress. Another is Varya—a particularly charming study of a young girl in love for the first time in her life. The scenes of her laundering Davydov’s shirts for him as a surprise, going out to the fields with him, and finally her reaction to his murder, are extremely touching.

p Despite some remarkably powerful scenes—such as the dialogue between Davydov and Arzhanov on the way out to the fields—in my opinion the second part of the novel is on the whole not as good as the first. Personally, I get somewhat bored with old Shchukar, the great village wit. If in the first book he helped to tone down the drama of the plot, in the second he no longer serves any such purpose and is rather overdone. Like any buffoonery for the sake of buffoonery his witticisms tend to become tiring. True, in the concluding pages of the novel, this old man appears in a new light and becomes more appealing and understandable.

p Virgin Soil Upturned, like the rest of Sholokhov’s stories, has a tragic ending. Davydov and Nagulnov are murdered by the enemies of Soviet power. It is the most true-to-life ending, I suppose. In the early nineteen-thirties the champions of the new system of Cossack collective farms still had to wage an armed struggle against their enemies. By the time Sholokhov finished writing this book thirty years later it had already become a historic novel. Davydov and Nagulnov have so endeared themselves to Soviet readers and have become such familiar names that in the Don country today legends are still woven about them and people want to believe that they are alive and still fighting for the Revolution somewhere. I find Nagulnov an especially attractive character. There is a peculiar appeal about this semi-literate man, whose whole being is “aimed at world revolution”. He cherishes a beautiful dream and a righteous hatred. He burns with passion for his idea. He is a living embodiment of that enormous tension which gripped the souls of the Russians in those years. The image of Nagulnov makes it psychologically understandable why those people went to the taiga, to the end of the world to build new towns, meanwhile living in snowdrifted tents, and stoically weathering all the hardships and the superhuman strain. Nagulnov is clearly the predecessor of those Soviet men who in the Great Patriotic War blocked the embrasures of pill boxes with their bodies and rammed enemy planes, braving certain death.

p In this novel, which is perhaps less integrated and lyrical than And Quiet Flows the Don, Sholokhov has brought out many essential features common to Russians of the Soviet epoch.

p Sholokhov writes slowly. He is still working on his last novel They Fought For Their Country about the Great Patriotic War against nazi Germany. I shall not hazard any guesses about the 209 reason. It may be that Sholokhov is finding it too painful to go back in mind to those atrocities which the nazis had perpetrated on our soil. Or maybe the characters of this new book have not yet taken final shape. Many episodes from this future novel have already been published and even brought out in book form, and they speak of the unwaning power of Sholokhov’s talent.

p This is especially true of his short story The Fate of a Man, which like And Quiet Flows the Don and Virgin Soil Upturned has been made into a film. This is the story of a soldier who is taken prisoner by the Germans, escapes, and comes home to find that the war has deprived him of everything—his family has been killed, buried under the ruins of his home. But the war has not killed his humanity. He comes across a hungry little orphan boy, adopts him and gradually comes back to life. The story is extraordinarily powerful. Short though it is, I know of no other story in which the tragedy suffered by millions of people in the last war has been revealed with such stark simplicity and psychological depth.

Sholokhov may write slowly, but he is going to be read for a long time to come. And the 1965 Nobel Prize came as a just reward.