p We had already left Tokyo far behind, and were driving in the burning sun towards the mountain area ot Nikko. We still had many miles to go, and we were very thirsty. As we drove through the main square of a small town we saw, on one side of it, an unbroken row of souvenir booths and kiosks selling cigarettes and soft drinks. We decided to break our journey for a few minutes.

p The booths were selling the products of native Japanese craftsmen, gifted and industrious workers who produce a huge variety of souvenirs. As we paused at one of the stalls, wondering what to buy for a souvenir of this unknown town in which we had chanced to stop, the young salesgirl asked the interpreter where we were from. On learning that we came from the Soviet Union, she asked whether the author, Sholokhov, was 8 with us. The newspapers had reported that he was travelling around Japan. Where was Sholokhov, how could she find him? When the interpreter told her Sholokhov was right there, a flurry of excitement ran through the stalls, the salesgirls disappeared briefly, to reappear carrying handsome volumes of Sholokhov’s works and autograph tablets. Sholokhov was buying cigarettes, and here he was besieged by these friendly but determined admirers, escaping only after a short authographing session.

p It should be emphasised that a stop in this little town was not pre-arranged, we were hot and thirsty; that’s why we stopped there. No one could have foreseen this or have made any preparations for us. This was a completely unplanned, completely spontaneous encounter with young Japanese readers.

p In Nikko itself we were to see the successful conclusion of a minor feat of endurance. A school-girl admirer of Sholokhov’s work had read in a newspaper that he was visiting Japan at the invitation of the Japanese Association of Writers. The approximate route he would be following was given and Nikko was included. Knowing that the ancient temple in Nikko was one of the sights which foreign tourists rarely missed, the girl decided to wait at the gates in the hope of obtaining the writer’s autograph. After five hours she began to lose heart; nevertheless, she stayed on. Her patience was rewarded. To her great embarrassment, she found herself being interviewed by reporters and photographed with Sholokhov. These photographs appeared in many newspapers and magazines and in one of them the girl is seen receiving the autograph for which she had waited so long.

In this case as in so many others the interpreters who accompanied us were indispensable and they deserve separate mention. Young but already widely known for their translations of Sholokhov’s works, they were not ordinary tourist guides. Two of them, Tokuya Kara and Taku Egawa, continue in the steps of their fathers, who had made the first translations of And Quiet Flows the Don in Japan. Incidentally, the father of one of them, Tetsuya Baba, had made the first ever foreign translation of And Quiet Flows the Don, doing it as the chapters appeared in a magazine before the novel was brought out in book form.

p Winter 1965. A mild winter. The swans do not migrate south from the bay on the shore of which stands the royal 9 palace but feed here and are always present to welcome and see off the ships.

p The ship they welcomed this time was the Svea Yarl, coming from the Finnish town of Turku and bringing to Stockholm the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature—Mikhail Sholokhov.

p That week in December is now a kaleidoscope of impressions and memories—of the traditional ceremonies in the Concert Hall and the Town Hall, of formal receptions and less formal gatherings, of noisy press-conferences and friendly, cordial conversations.

p A press-conference was held on the day of Sholokhov’s arrival and of it the newspaper Stockholms Tidningen wrote: “On the first day of his stay in Stockholm Sholokhov has already broken all records—so many journalists have never before been gathered in the hall of the Grand Hotel.”

p At a reception organised by Tiden Publishers, which have done much to bring Sholokhov’s writings to the attention of Swedish readers, the general director of the publishing house, Bengt Christell, greeted the author with the following words:

p “As your publishers we rejoice with you, but not simply because we sell your books.... We are happy today because a great and truthful realistic art has been given recognition.”

p The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Sholokhov was made “for the artistic force and truthfulness with which, in his Don epopee, he described an historical era in the life of the Russian people”.

p In his speech during the presentation ceremony at the Concert Hall Dr. Anders Osterling, President of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, spoke of the impressive realism with which the life of the Cossacks was described in And Quiet Flows the Don. It was a work powerful in every respect. The prize, he said, had come “late but, fortunately, not too late . . . to enrich the list of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature with the name of one of the most outstanding writers of modern times”. Turning to Sholokhov, he added: “This prize is a just and grateful tribute to the significant contribution you have made to Soviet literature, a contribution which is as well known in our country as it is in the whole world.”

p In the less formal atmosphere of a banquet at the Town Hall, Dr. K.R. Gierow, permanent secretary for literature of the Swedish Academy, made a witty and eloquent speech. Curiously, the part of his speech that was addressed to Sholokhov rested on a literary figure that had evidently been suggested by 10 an imprecise translation in a newspaper report. However, this mistake was cleverly used by Dr. Gierow to demonstrate his remarkable oratory.

p “Mr. Sholokhov,” Dr. Gierow began, “when you were awarded the Nobel Prize, you were hunting in the Urals and, according to a Moscow newspaper, on that very day you shot two wild geese with one (!) long shot—-But if we take our hats off to you today as a crack shot among the Nobel Prize winners of the past year, this is because talk about such feats of marksmanship has a bearing on your work.

p “An epic work such as yours could have been written with great sweep and breadth, with a stormy yet majestic flood of episodes and turns of speech, with a confident mastery in resolving the theme—and in virtue of all this it would already have been a masterpiece which would never be forgotten. It would have been possible to infuse it with a living feeling of the dramatic situation, with keen observation of every detail having artistic significance, with a passionate sympathy for man’s fate— and all this would have made it a work forever to be loved. The uniting of both these possibilities is a token of genius, of your genius. It happens as rarely as getting two birds lined up for a shot. You secured both ‘birds’ with one ‘stone’.

p “Your tale of the old regime, desperately defending its tottering positions, and the new regime, struggling as desperately for each blood-soaked inch of ground, was conceived on a grand scale. The question is constantly suggested: what rules the world? And the answer is given: the heart. The heart of man, with its love and cruelty, sadness, hopes, humiliation and pride. The heart of man, the true field of battle whence come all the victories and defeats which fall to the lot of our world. Thus your art crosses all frontiers and we take it to our hearts with deep gratitude....”

p . . .Amidst all these events the writer found time to meet many young people—the students of Stockholm and the old university town of Uppsala. More than 800 students came to meet Sholokhov in the Slavonic Institute and the university in Uppsala. Students and teachers alike showed enormous interest in the work of the outstanding Soviet writer and asked him a great number of questions, receiving lively, informal answers. An atmosphere of friendliness, trust and mutual respect was immediately established that was further enhanced by the gentle humour native to Sholokhov, a humour which gives conversation an especially warm tone and always wins the sympathies of those with whom he talks.

p I remember now the auditorium of another of Europe’s ancient universities. Students had gathered there to find in Sholokhov’s works the answers to philosophical questions; to seek out advice on how a man should live his life. The writer was present in spirit only, yet in a sense the young people talked with him and appealed to him, asking him for support in the passionate disputes which flared up during their discussions of life’s varied and important problems.

p These young men and women were meeting in Jena, at the Slavonic Institute. They had come from the GDR’s largest universities to take part in a conference which was to sum up the work carried out by the higher educational establishments of the entire republic. The theme of the conference was socialist humanism in the work of Mikhail Sholokhov.

p The meeting, which was packed, was presided over by a young female student. Theses for discussion, which had been produced collectively by three students and circulated among all the conference’s participants, and questions put by the three authors were debated. Students of all levels of seniority and from every part of the GDR spoke, some of them several times; as the discussion developed, more and more topical problems literally interposed themselves into the debate.

p At one point two speakers appeared on the stage at once: opinions in the group which these two girls represented were divided and therefore two people had been given the task of defending the differing points of view.

p Some of the students did not yet have a deep enough grasp of the artistic and aesthetic problems involved, nor of the essence of Sholokhov’s realism, to competently analyse his consummate craft. And so some problems, such as the question of the concrete historical circumstances in which his characters were placed, took second place to discussions of their actions and patterns of thought from the point of view of the moral and aesthetic demands of our day.

p However, in this very fact lay the special value of the discussions. Parallels were drawn between Sholokhov’s images and the characters created by the most popular modern German writers. Debate sprang up on the responsibility of the Communist for his neighbour (the initial spur for this was the relationship between Grigory Melekhov and Mikhail Koshevoi in the novel And Quiet Flows the Don), on whether all means should be considered humane if they are directed towards a humane end, on whether the problem of the tragic exists under socialism, on what makes a character “positive”—his intentions 12 and actions or his actions alone (disputes here centred round the person of Nagulnov) and on a variety of other questions.

p Of course, these young men and women were rediscovering what has already been discovered, finding what has already been found. But never mind. The important thing was that every one of them wanted to arrive independently at the truth, to solve life’s problems and to solve them for himself and his contemporaries. Reading Sholokhov’s writings awoke in them the urge to discuss such vital questions as the shaping of a world outlook; it made them ponder on the place they should assume in life and their duty as citizens, and the need to affirm the moral and ethical standards upheld by people struggling for a communist tomorrow and a new world.

p The salutatory address (laudatio) presented to Sholokhov by the German scholars who came to Veshenskaya to hand the writer the diploma of honorary doctorate of philosophy conferred upon him by Karl Marx University in Leipzig, concluded with the following significant words:

“The works of Sholokhov have become an inexhaustible wellspring for our people and our youth, including students, from which they draw the ideals of an authentic revolutionary spirit, firm adherence to the Party, irreproachable probity, deep humaneness and total dedication to the cause of their lives.”