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p Low I bow, and as a son I kiss your fresh earth, Cossack steppeland of the Don, soaked with blood that will not rust.

p When I think of Sholokhov, two pictures spring to mind, so different it is hard to believe that they are of one and the same person. They are separated by many years, years of dramatic historic events.

p Sholokhov is standing in an unbuttoned sheepskin coat, a fur hat casually tilted at an angle so that it partly covers his high forehead, merry eyes smiling from a thin, youthful face. The nineteen-year-old boy has just had his first stories published. After receiving one of his first author’s fees from Komsomoliya, a youth magazine, he has run gaily out into the yard with some friends and there someone has snapped them for a souvenir of the occasion. In spite of his youth he already has a wealth of experience behind him: in those years young people became independent very early in life. He fought in the Civil War, occupied the post of supplies commissar, pursued White bands, and had been taken prisoner by them. Now he has come to Moscow from his native Don region, intending to study and vaguely dreaming of becoming a writer, and it looks as though his dream is beginning to come true.

p “One day in April a stocky young fellow came into the office, wearing an Astrakhan fur hat which was much the worse for wear and a shabby coat thrown wide open,” Ivan Molchanov, then secretary of the Komsomoliya editorial office, recalls. “He took a manuscript from a side pocket and placed it on the table. It was entitled Melon Field Keeper and was signed by a completely unknown writer ’M. Sholokhov’. Alexander Zharov and I read the manuscript and immediately sent it to the printshop. Those were hungry days. I insisted that the authors 6 of the first number, which had not yet come out, should be paid something in advance. The next day I wrote out the first payment slip for Sholokhov.”  [6•* 

p Then I see him many, many years later. Grey-haired, with wrinkles round his eyes, wearing a smart dress-coat, Sholokhov stands stiff and proud, a look of almost stern arrogance on his face, receiving the Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden.

p More than forty years had passed since the first photograph was taken, forty years entirely devoted to literature.

p Sholokhov wrote his first stories in 1923. Later, in 1926, they were collected in the book Tales from the Don. He began work on And Quiet Flows the Don in 1925 when he was twenty. The first book of Virgin Soil Upturned appeared in 1932. He was a war correspondent during the war, writing articles and stories. He began the novel They Fought for Their Fatherland. The end of 1956 saw the publication of his short story The Fate of a Man. In 1959 he finished the second book of Virgin Soil Upturned. The appearance of each of Sholokhov’s books was in itself a great event. But, as is the case with all truly great works, it was an important event too for the reader when he discovered them for himself.

p Sholokhov is one of those writers who prefer not to talk about the actual process of writing. Yet from what he has said here and there over the years, we can gain a pretty clear idea of the motive forces underlying his art.

p The motive force at work in his writings is of course his love for his native region. He lives today in his beloved Don country where he spent his childhood, and where his youth passed in the turmoil of the Civil War. Veshenskaya village is as inseparably linked with Sholokhov as Yasnaya Polyana with Tolstoi.

p Love for his native region means above all love for the people he has lived among: the farmers and soldiers, hunters and fishermen. “I wanted to write about the people I was born among and whom I knew,”  [6•**  he was to say, looking back over his work on And Quiet Flows the Don.

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p The life of the people represents an inexhaustible source of material for Sholokhov. He cannot conceive his work without constant contact with the people who later stride across the pages of his novels.

p Sholokhov maintains this contact when he is writing, when he rides to a field-camp and talks to the tractordrivers round the campfire, or when merely chatting to an acquaintance he has bumped into in the street.

p “During almost thirty years as a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. I never once felt my duties to be a burden. On the contrary, I have got a tremendous amount out of the contacts my work involves,” Sholokhov said at a meeting with voters in June 1966. Meeting new people and getting to know their lives, their joys and sorrows means live material for the artist. If the writer shuts himself up in an ivory tower, he can never hope to acquire that wealth of experience which daily contacts with other people can bring him.

p The first book of Virgin Soil Upturned serves as a perfect illustration of this, for the whole book was the result of Sholokhov’s direct participation in collectivisation, was in fact an answer to many of the difficult questions that arose during the revolutionary transformation of life in the countryside.

p Sholokhov’s speech in Stockholm after receiving the Nobel Prize in December 1965 seems to sum up the writer’s views on art very neatly. Throughout his fifty years of activity as a writer, Sholokhov has never ceased to believe that art’s noble purpose is to exert a salutary influence on mankind.

p “To speak honestly to the reader, to tell people the truth, however bitter, to strengthen in the hearts of men their faith in the future and in their own power to create that future; to be an active fighter for peace throughout the world, and foster by one’s writings other such fighters; to unite people in their natural and noble yearning for progress. The arts have a tremendous power over men’s minds and hearts. I think a person has the right to call himself an artist if he directs this power to creating beauty in men’s souls for the good of mankind.”

p Sholokhov draws his strength from reality—reality in its historical aspect, reality in its development, the reality of everyday life. His heroes move in the concrete, 8 material world of things. They are reality itself, created with that precision of characterisation which gives each of them a unique, inimitable life of his own.

p I am moved to stress this by the arguments which have flared up about realism. Sholokhov’s works represent one of the most weighty and convincing answers to the question of the essence of realism in our age.

p I approach the problems raised in these arguments as follows: has reality been exhausted as the only object of artistic apprehension, that is, reality explored for the purpose of obtaining the maximum objectivity, or does this objective approach to the picture of life and characters, this attempt to recreate the world of things in the world of art, no longer satisfy our perception of things, our aesthetic tastes and demands?

p Are we to have reality as such, in all its hardness and complexity, or the reality of myth, reality distorted through the prism of purely individual, absolutely subjective perception, where the writer’s ego serves as the model of the world?

p Is it in fact essential that we make such a choice, or can various trends exist side by side in contemporary art? If so, we ought perhaps to examine and define the real potentialities inherent in these different trends.

p Realism obviously presupposes a definite relationship between the artist and the world he lives in.

p “I am one of those writers who see in unlimited opportunity to serve the working people with their pen the greatest honour and the greatest freedom.

p “This is the source of everything, that is how I see ’he writer’s, the Soviet writer’s place in the world today.” These are Sholokhov’s words from his address in Stockholm.

p Sholokhov the writer lives in a colourful world, the authenticity of which is confirmed by every line of his books. This world exists as given reality, which requires understanding and explaining. Sholokhov is involved in human society, and has a strongly developed sense of responsibility not simply towards life and man in the abstract, but towards those people whose vital beliefs and hopes he shares. This recognition of historical community, of man’s capabilities and personal responsibility is the basic essence underlying Sholokhov’s epos. The 9 reality his works portray has its historical substantiation and social explanation.

p Gorky apparently understood this. In 1932 he remarked in a conversation that “sensible people throughout Europe accept Sholokhov’s works as reality itself".

p Sholokhov’s heroes—this applies equally to Grigory Melekhov, Semyon Davidov, Makar Nagulnov or Andrei Sokolov—not only exist in time but actually express the age they live in, living its hopes and quests, its joys and sorrows.

p Sholokhov focusses his attention on apprehending the complex relationship between the individual and society, between personal urges and the character of the age. Through the arts man apprehends himself and the nature of the relationship between the individual and society, between man and Nature.

p Art helps mankind put its great ideals into practice. Art which is imbued with the ideals of rejuvenating life is a source of inspiration, strengthening man’s faith and hopes.

p But art can only be so genuinely humanistic on condition that it has its roots in the people. In Stockholm Sholokhov spoke proudly, forcefully and ardently about what has always been and always will be the aim of his whole life.

p “The historical path along which my people have advanced was no beaten track. They have gone forward as explorers, as pioneers of life. My aim as a writer has always been to pay tribute in all my works to this nation of toilers, builders and heroes, who have never attacked anyone, but have always known how to defend what they have created, to defend their freedom and honour, their right to build their future in the way they themselves have chosen.

p “I would like my books to help make people better and purer in heart, to arouse love for man, and the desire to take an active part in the struggle for the ideals of humanism and the progress of mankind. If I have been at all successful then I consider myself a happy man.”

p Sholokhov’s name already takes its place alongside such world-famous Russian writers as Gogol, Tolstoi, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. “He is the most popular Russian writer in the West since Chekhov,” wrote the 10 well-known English writer and scholar C. P. Snow. “In England and America he is read far more than any of his younger contemporaries. You can now see paper-back editions of his works in any London book-store. I consider, as do many of my friends, that And Quiet Flows the Don is the finest book to have appeared anywhere in the last forty years.”  [10•* 

p Ernest Hemingway said: “I am very fond of Russian literature. I owe a lot to its influence, to Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, and of course Gogol’s Taras Bulba. Of the modern writers Sholokhov is my favourite.”  [10•** 

p One could cite numerous examples of remarks by famous writers, artists, scholars—and indeed readers from every walk of life—which witness growing interest all over the world in the works of Mikhail Sholokhov.

We find ourselves turning again and again to Sholokhov, to his experience, his knowledge and his works. It is over thirty years since he completed And Quiet Flows the Don, and more than thirty-five since the publication of Virgin Soil Upturned. Arrested in its flight by Sholokhov’s mighty hand, the past lives in his books not only as a time that is over and done with, but (and this is the mark of truly great art) in relation to the present. It clarifies the present, and helps us draw up our future aims, moving us to think, argue and search.

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