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1

p Mikhail Sholokhov was the first writer to give such a broad picture of the life of the Don Cossacks, and the first to create an epic of the Cossacks’ role in the Revolution.

p The Don Cossacks who never knew serfdom were a caste apart from the ordinary peasants. The difference was not only in their education—Cossacks were brought up to be bold and resourceful and prepared for military service from childhood. The tsarist government had always encouraged them to consider themselves a special caste, and to look on the “muzhiks” and town workers with contempt. They were brought up as loyal servants of “tsar and country".

p Grigory Melekhov had had it impressed on him since childhood that “Cossack” was the most honourable of titles. Indeed, the biggest insult among the Cossacks was to call someone a muzhik.

p When Stockman, the underground Bolshevik organiser, intervened in the murderous brawl that had broken out between Cossacks and Ukrainians and said, “Long ago serf peasants ran away from the landowners and settled along the Don. They came to be known as Cossacks,” he is met by the angry cry: “The swine wants to make muzhiks out of us!" (1, 189). This caste alienation, so carefully cultivated by the tsarist authorities and the Cossack landowners, officers and kulaks was to manifest itself with particular acuteness during the Civil War, in the separatist movement whereby the Don Cossacks strove to secede from revolutionary Russia and set up their own “Cossack system".

p The Cossacks were won over by a big allotment of land. As one of the heroes of Serafimovich’s story On the Brink 45 put it, speaking of the Cossacks who had helped put down the 1905 Revolution, “they stuffed themselves on land".

p The .way the Melekhovs—who were middle Cossacks—lived is clear from the words of the head of the family Pantelei Prokofyevich: “Even without this year’s harvest we’ve got grain enough for a couple of years. Praise be, we’ve got our bins full to the lids and some more elsewhere....”

p The Cossacks exploited the peasant “outsiders”, and the landless settlers. But the poor and middle Cossacks worked the land themselves with the help of their families. “Me and the old man slaved away day and night,” says Ilyinichna, and in the novel we see the life of toil of many Cossack families.

p In And Quiet Flows the Don Sholokhov lays bare the social heterogeneity of the Cossacks at the time of the Revolution.

p Cossack generals and officers like Listnitsky owned vast estates—thousands of acres of land. The kulak Miron Korshunov had accumulated great wealth and power on his Tatarsky village. He employed permanent labourers, bought up land, and went in for thoroughbred livestock breeding. The merchant Mokhov and his partner Atepin squeezed the poorer Cossacks, making loans for interest.

p Cossacks like Mikhail Koshevoi, unable to cultivate their own land, worked as hired labourers. Others, like Ivan Alexeyevich Kotlyarov, abandoned the land and went to work at Mokhov’s mill, becoming semi-peasant, semi-worker. Among these poorer villagers arose a deep discontent with the existing state of things. A worker at Mokhov’s mill, nicknamed Knave, remembered 1905 and nursed a seething hatred towards the wealthy and a longing for revenge. He was confident that there would be another revolution and that the time would come to get even with the oppressors.

p Before the war and Revolution came and stirred up the whole country Grigory Melekhov never even thought of social problems. The Melekhov family, although not rich, were reasonably well-off and respected. Grigory loved his farm and the work on it. We see him haymaking, harvesting, ploughing in autumn. He felt an inner need for work. Without it life lost its meaning and when he was 46 away at war, his mind returned again and again to his near and dear ones, his native village, and work in the fields, and he was gripped by a deep nostalgic yearning. “It would be good to have his hands on the plough-handles and walk along the damp furrow behind the plough, his nostrils greedily drinking in the raw, fresh scent of crumbling earth, the bitter smell of grass cut by the ploughshare.”

p Grigory Melekhov grew up in a society which greatly respected military valour. The Cossacks went to church and attended village assemblies dressed in military uniform with shoulder straps, and decked out with all their medals. Awards like the St. George Cross evoked great respect and admiration for the bearer. This attitude to tsarist awards which had been instilled in Grigory from childhood, was to do him much harm in the future, leading him astray from the right path on which the Bolshevik Garanzha had set him when he was in hospital.

p “Serve as you should. Service for the Tsar will not be in vain,” Grigory’s father writes to him when he is doing his army service before the outbreak of war, signing the letter: “Your father, Senior Sergeant Pantelei Melekhov" (1, 313). His father was more than his parent; he was a Senior Sergeant. For Pantelei Prokofyevich this military title meant that added respect was due.

p Cossack families were patriarchal. The father was the senior member of the family and absolute master of the household. He could have the village give a disobedient son a public birching. Fear of his father and absolute obedience to him was instilled in the Cossack from childhood, and such obedience and respect for their elders was taught not only in the home but in the army too during military service. Thus the senior Cossacks had the right to punish their juniors.

p Pantelei Prokofyevich kept a firm hand over his family. When in a rage he was capable of beating Grigory over the back with his crutch, and giving his wife what for if she took the part of a member of the family who had been disobedient. This did not prevent the Melekhovs from being a loving, close-knit family. When Grigory rushed on Stepari Astakhov, who was beating his wife Aksinya almost to death because of her affair with Grigory, Pyotr did not hesitate to join his younger brother. 47 The two brothers’ love for one another is apparent throughout the novel. Pyotr’s death at the hand of the Communist Koshevoi during the Civil War is one of the blows that drives Grigory onto the path of struggle [ against the people.

p In spite of his mettlesome, touchy nature, Grigory got along pretty well with his family. When his father decided to marry Grigory, who had “disgraced him" by carrying on with Aksinya, he tamely led Natalya to the altar. Of course this was largely due, too, to youthful thoughtlessness and his underestimating the strength of his feelings for Aksinya.

p Grigory loves his home and family and is attached to his native village. He had never felt discontent with the way of life he had grown up with. Even when he broke with his family and went into service he was not divorced from village life. True, he did dream of going away to the Kuban, far, far away to where “beyond the rolling hills, beyond the long grey road lay a welcoming land of blue skies, a fairy-tale land with Aksinya’s love, in all its rebellious late-flowering strength, to make it the more attractive" (1, 223). But the fairy-tale tone which Sholokhov adopts in this passage conveys how unrealistic and impracticable this dream was. Grigory is due to be called up for military service and this keeps him from going right away from the village. Even so, he would have been unlikely to leave his native parts. When Aksinya proposed that they throw up everything and go to the mines “far away”, Grigory answered her with surprising cool-headedness and sensible clear-sightedness: “You’re a fool, Aksinya, a fool! You talk away, but you say nothing worth listening to. How can I leave the farm? I’ve got to do my military service next year.... I’ll never stir anywhere away from the land.... I’ll never leave the village" (1, 80).

p Indeed Grigory misses the farm and the village when he and Aksinya are working on Listnitsky’s estate at Yagodnoye. “I miss the village, Pyotr,” he complains to his brother (1, 284), and eagerly asks him for news of home in a tone which leaves no doubt as to how important it is to him.

p Although Nagulnov in Virgin Soil Upturned is somewhat similar to Grigory in character, there is this big 48 difference: whereas the former breaks forever with his rich family because of his early born dislike for “property”, Grigory never really burns his bridges and always leaves a chance for a reconciliation with his family and the village. When his father and brother suggest he return it is because they sense this. When Grigory, who is serving in the army, is informed that Natalya is living with his family and that she is waiting for him, he gives an evasive, non-committal reply, merely saying that Aksinya has a child by him, and that he cannot abandon it. This strong attachment to his farm, to his land typical of the peasants generally, was particularly strong in the case of the relatively well-off middle peasant. Throughout the Civil War Grigory never forgot for a moment that he had his own land, his own farm.

2

p Grigory Melekhov’s great humaneness reveals itself in everything. In a violent family drama, in the trials of war, and in the minutiae of everyday life—everywhere he demonstrates the strong sense of justice, self-respect and passionate love for life.

p When he accidentally cuts a little wild duckling in two while mowing he stares with deep compassion at the little ball growing cold in his palm. The pain he felt was a manifestation of Grigory’s characteristic love for all live creatures, for people and for nature.

p It was only natural therefore that Grigory should have been so distressed when he first came face to face with the horrors of war. For a long time he could not get over his first battle and the Austrian he had cut down. “I cut down a man, and I’m sick at heart because of him, the swine!" he confides to his brother (1, 404). He begins to have doubts about the point of the First World War and is haunted by an uneasy feeling of its being as futile as it is disastrous.

p As a farmer, Grigory has a strong sense of kinship with the world around him. This organic relation to nature and the capacity to appreciate its beauty has long appeared in Russian literature as a measure of man and his spirit. Man’s attitude to nature was a favourite method of 49 characterisation with Lev Tolstoi, whose negative characters have as a rule a limited awareness and appreciation of life in all its facets. Sholokhov adopts this method widely in And Quiet Flows the Don. The paucity of spirit of Colonel Listnitsky is revealed in his inability to appreciate the beauty of the Don steppe, while the rich natures of the Communists Likhachov and Podtyolkov are expressed in their full-blooded response to the beauties of nature. Sholokhov’s favourite characters—Grigory, Aksinya and Pantelei Prokofyevich—live and move in the world of nature with its wealth of colour and sound.

p We see Grigory early in the morning on the day his brother is due to leave for the summer training camp, leading his horse down to the Don to water it. “Slanting across the Don lay the wavy never-ridden track of the moonlight. Over the river hung a mist, and above it, the stars, like sprinkled grain. The horse set its hoofs down cautiously. The slope to the water was hard going. From the farther side of the river came the quacking of ducks. A sheat-fish jumped with a splash in the muddy shallows by the bank, hunting at random for smaller fry.

p “Grigory stood a long time by the river. The bank exuded a dank and musty rottenness. A tiny drop of water fell from the horse’s lips. There was a light, pleasant void in Grigory’s heart, he felt good and free from thought" (1, 30).

p The scene is described as if through Grigory’s eyes. There is nothing unusual about it for him, it is part of his everyday life. Yet he sees the stars as being “like sprinkled grain”. He notices in passing the quacking of ducks, and his attention is drawn to the splash a fish makes jumping, which for him, keen fisher that he is, evokes an almost tangible image of the sheat-fish hunting at dawn. Sholokhov shows amazing skill here in the way he reveals Grigory’s response to nature. He rejects a conventional phrase to describe the beam of moonlight on the river and uses instead the typical Don word for track, and the expressive term “never-ridden”. This is more than a precise description. It gives the narrative a touch of local colour so that we see Grigory standing by the river looking at the track of moonlight and sensing, rather 50 than being consciously aware of it, the transparent path, untrodden by man.

p The reader cannot help feeling that the “never-ridden track of the moonlight" is part of Grigory’s own personal experience, and that he is part of this joyous world of light and colour.

p The landscape in which we see Grigory is far more than a setting for the action in progress. Sholokhov always tries to make us feel that Grigory is a part of the world he moves in. For Grigory, Aksinya’s hair “smells like henbane" (1, 45) and “the faint scent of the winter wind, or perhaps of fresh steppe hay, came from her fresh cold mouth" (1, 225). By means of these and similar poetic comparisons the author tries to transmit Grigory’s sensitivity, his appreciation of a woman’s beauty. In fact Sholokhov endows Grigory with a sharp appreciation of all that is beautiful.

p A character’s real nature and aesthetic significance is frequently revealed through his environment and his relationships with other characters. Grigory’s appreciation of beauty is revealed in the story of his relationship with Aksinya and Natalya, for example. His love for the proud Aksinya, whose wild, fatal beauty does not fade with the years, and his life with Natalya—also beautiful but in quite a different way, a faithful, loving wife and mother—throw much light on his character.

p Grigory is a man of strong passions and resolve. His love for Aksinya with all its violent ups and downs is remarkably strong and deep. When he comes home on leave to convalesce after his discharge from hospital and learns that Aksinya has been “carrying on" with young lieutenant Listnitsky, he gives him a fearful beating, drops Aksinya and returns home. But neither Aksinya’s faithlessness, nor life with Natalya, nor even the children could douse his passion, and he spent many a night at the front yearning for Aksinya.

p Grigory’s highly developed sense of personal dignity and his consciousness of being any man’s equal was bound to lead to many a sharp conflict in a class society with its laws of subordination and oppression—as indeed it did. While the new recruits were passing muster Grigory felt a strong dislike for the white-handed officers. His “rough swarthy fingers" happened to lightly brush “the 51 sugar-white hand" of one of the officers. The officer snatched his hand away, rubbed it on the edge of his greatcoat, frowning fastidiously, and drew on his glove. Grigory noticed his action and straightened up with a bitter smile. Their eyes met, and the officer flushed and raised his voice: “What’s all this, what’s all this, Cossack?" (1, 308). On a later occasion, when a sergeant-major swoops on him with raised fist by a well in Radzivillovo, he addresses him with fearful hatred in his voice: “Look here ... if you strike me—I’ll kill you. Understand?" (1, 333). And the sergeant-major who, encouraged by the officers, was used to settling things with his fists, turned on his heel and walked away.

p In the grey routine of army life Grigory often felt a wall of silence between himself and the smart, idle officers. It was only natural that he, a working man used to earning his living by the sweat of his brow, although not fully aware of the class division of society, should nonetheless understand perfectly well that landowners and officers belonged to a different world, and that he should despise these parasites and idlers who were his “superiors”. This feeling was to grow in him, and during the Civil War his deep, searing hatred for the oppressors and parasites would erupt on many an occasion.

p Grigory was always ready to take up arms when human dignity was insulted. He was ready to use his fists on the Cossacks who raped Franya the housemaid, and would have, had they not tied him up and threatened to kill him; and when on the parade ground the troop commander asked him why a button was missing from his greatcoat, Grigory, overwhelmed by the memory of what had happened, felt like crying for the first time in years at his powerlessness.

This was Grigory Melekhov at the outbreak of the First World War.

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p The art of moulding an Impressive, powerful literary character is a difficult and complex one. We may feel that we have learned a lot about Grigory Melekhov from the everyday life of himself and his family, from his 52 complicated and confused relationships with JNatalya arid Aksinya. The swarthy Cossack with his sombre, somewhat savage expression, hot-tempered to the point of recklessness, proud and always ready to uphold his self-respect, resolute, abrupt, tender and rough, stands before the reader as real as if he were of flesh and blood. There is remarkable strength in his slightly hunched body, his darting glance, the way he works and the dashing figure he cuts in the saddle. Yet we cannot really know the young Grigory completely until we have examined the socio-historic environment he lived and grew up in.

p And Quiet Flows the Don is a freely flowing narrative, with many characters and events but indirectly linked to the main heroes. Yet, at the same time, every scene, every chapter, throws light on the complicated and illstarred life of Grigory Melekhov, often from the most unexpected angle.

p The picture we are given of the life and fortunes of the Don Cossacks, while being of interest in itself, at the same time serves as an indirect means of characterisation, throwing additional light on Grigory Melekhov.

p We know next to nothing, for example, of Grigory’s attitude to the war when it first broke out; we do not know what he thought it was all about when he found himself flung into the bloody conflict. Sholokhov is a clever writer who leaves nothing to chance. He switches the scene of action to Tatarsky village and to Stockman, slowly but surely sowing the seeds of unrest and discontent with the existing order among the poorer Cossacks, thereby furthering their awakening to class-consciousness. Stockman tries to explain the causes of war, the struggle among capitalist states for markets and colonies. Those he talked to apparently understood him, but they were a small group, numbering ten at the outside.

p The village elders spoke of the war in very different terms. Talking with the old men in the market place, Pantelei Prokofyevich told them how Grigory had written that there would soon be war. The old men recalled past wars and exchanged prognoses:

p “’But there won’t be any war.... Look at the harvest.’

p “’The harvest has nothing to do with it. It’s the students giving trouble, I expect.’

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p “’In any case we shall be the last to hear of it. But who will the war be with?’

p “’With the Turks, about the sea. They can’t come to an agreement on how to divide the sea.’

p “’Is it so difficult? Let them divide it into two strips, like we do the meadowland.’

p “The talk turned to jest, and the old men went about their business" (1, 319).

p Such primitive notions about war and its causes were only possible in an isolated community, and in a place far removed and isolated from the main proletarian centres.

p The account of the first battles in which Grigory took part is preceded by the lively, picturesque scene of the general mobilisation of the Cossacks. Sholokhov describes the animated, motley crowd in the square, interspersing the narrative with dialogue in a masterly fashion. The excited chatter of the crowd in the square seems to buzz in the reader’s ears as if he were there himself. The women, attired in their holiday clothes, lined the fences along the streets. The commission inspected the horses. Many of the Cossacks were drunk.

p “’But suppose there’s a war?’

p “’Pah, my friend! What country could stand up to us?’

p “In a neighbouring group a handsome, elderly Cossack was arguing heatedly.

p “’It’s nothing to do with us. Let them do their own fighting, we haven’t got our corn in yet.’

p “’It’s a shame! Here we are standing here, and on a day like this we could harvest enough for a whole year.’

p “’The cattle will get among the stocks!’

p “’And we’d just begun to reap the barley!’"

p This sober, circumstantial talk (clearly elderly Cossack farmers are speaking) is interrupted by joking and complaining at the tavern being closed leaving them nowhere to drink. Then a “blood-stained and completely drunk" Cossack is led into the village administration. Tearing open his shirt he shouts: “I’ll show the muzhiks! I’ll have their blood! They’ll know the Don Cossack!" which causes a ripple of laughter and comments of approval.

p “’That’s right, give it to them!’

p “’What have they grabbed him for?’

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p “’He went for some muzhik!’

p “’Well, they deserve it.’

p “’We’ll give them some more!’

p “’I took a hand when they put them down in 1905. That was a sight worth seeing!’

p “’There’s going to be war. They’ll be sending us again to put them down.’

p “’Enough of that. Let them hire people for that, or let the police do it. It’s a shame for us to’" (1, 343-344).

p These masterfully penned scenes, quite apart from the validity they have in themselves, are also important both for the picture they give of the environment in which Grigory was brought up and the help they give in understanding the ideas with which the young Cossack was equipped when he entered the war. Grigory had a minimal grasp of politics, limited to his naive ideas about the tsar, the country, and his military duty as a Cossack. He displayed great courage in battle, and was the first in the village to be awarded a Cross of St. George, but he did not think very hard about what he was fighting for. As time went on and battle followed battle he grew more and more weary and disillusioned and became increasingly perplexed and tormented by doubts.

p While in hospital Grigory met up with the clever and sharp-tongued Bolshevik soldier Garanzha, whose words, as powerful as they were true, turned the whole system on which his life had hitherto been based into a smoking ruin. “It had already grown rotten, eaten up with the canker of the monstrous absurdity of the war, and it needed only a jolt. That jolt was given, and Grigory’s artless straightforward mind awoke" (1, 512). With horror he realised that what Garanzha said about the senselessness of the war was true. He was unable to sleep and awoke Garanzha in the night. Blazing with anger he asked him: “You say we are being driven to death for the benefit of the rich. But what about the people? Don’t they understand?" He struggled with the question of how to stop the war. “So you think everything has to be turned upside down?... And what will you do with the war when you’ve got the new government?... How are you going to root out war, when men have fought for ages?" (1, 513,514). Garanzha had an answer for 55 everything, and on saying goodbye to him, Grigory thanked him with feeling: “Well, khokhol, thank you for opening my eyes. I can see now, and I’m not good to know" (1,516).

p It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Grigory’s first political schooling. It was to bear good fruit in the first months of the October Revolution, when spurred to action by it he was to side with the Bolsheviks and lead the Cossacks into the struggle against the Whites. And despite the fact that he was soon to wander from the true path, it nonetheless gave a mighty jolt to his ideas and feelings.

p Grigory returns home on leave, and his discontent with the war and rage against those who drove people to the slaughter, combined with his own wounded self-esteem explode in the scene where he beats Listnitsky mercilessly. His family and the entire village soothed his tortured soul, flattering him with unconcealed adulation. After all, here was the first Cossack from the village to have received a Cross of St. George home on leave. The old men talked to him as an equal. He caught sidelong, respectful glances following him wherever he went. People took off their hats to him as he walked by and the women and young girls did not conceal their admiration. His family were almost ingratiatingly attentive to his needs. Pantelei Prokofyevich strode proudly along beside him on their way to church or to the market place. It was only natural that it should have gone to his head. After all, there were few who could hope to command such respect. The truth Garanzha had revealed to him, and his bitter invective faded into the darkest recesses of his mind. The time-honoured order seemed unshakeable, the deep-rooted Cossack concepts of honour, and military valour which had been instilled in him throughout his life once again assumed their former exciting attraction. “Grigory returned to Tatarsky one man, and went back to the front another.... Mentally still unreconciled to the senselessness of the war, nonetheless he faithfully defended his Cossack honour" (2, 55, 56); he seized “every opportunity of displaying reckless prowess, risking his life in madcap adventures, changing his clothes and going into the enemy’s rear, capturing outposts, and feeling that the pain for other men which had oppressed 56 him during the first days of the war had gone for ever" (2, 59-60).

p With the advent of such an important historical event as the imperialist war, bringing in its wake so many serious and unexpected consequences, and with a revolutionary situation rapidly developing in the country it was important that the spotlight be trained for a while on Grigory’s socio-political awareness. Sholokhov brings him into contact with various people professing very definite social views of a radically different nature. The Cossack Uryupin and the soldier Garanzha are the litmus-paper on which we can observe the various changes Grigory’s views undergo.

p Grigory meets up with Uryupin at the front during the war. Uryupin preaches a loathsome philosophy of contempt and hatred for man, and indeed epitomises the ideal of the Cossack warrior, loyal to tsar and country, so dear to the hearts of the governing classes of tsarist Russia. He is a true product of the bourgeois-landowner class society with all its inhumanity and callousness.

p Uryupin’s cynical advice to Grigory who is still tormented by the memory of the Austrian he had killed, is: “Cut a man down boldly!... Don’t think about the why and wherefore. You’re a Cossack, and it’s your business to cut down without asking questions.... You mustn’t kill an animal unless it’s necessary, but destroy man! He’s a heathen, unclean; he poisons the earth, he lives like a toadstool!" (1, 433). Grigory takes an active dislike to him from the outset. He fires a shot at Uryupin when he learns that he has cut down a Hungarian prisoner in cold blood. When Uryupin refers to the incident some time later Grigory informs him: “If I’d killed you I’d have had one sin the less on my conscience" (1, 490).

p Grigory’s instinctive humanity, sucked in with his mother’s milk, finally triumphed in Grigory over the philosophy of annihilation professed by Uryupin. The obvious senselessness of the war aroused uneasy thoughts, anguish and discontent in him. At this juncture the author brings Grigory into contact with Garanzha, and face to face with a great human truth. For a while democracy and humanism gain the upper hand in Grigory over his class and property prejudices.

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p Grigory begins his tireless search for a great truth, a solution valid for the whole people. Later he was to renounce his search as a naive childish dream, and turn to finding a solution which only took Cossack interests into account. He returns home from hospital, convinced that he has theright answer and knows on which side the truth lies.

p His break with Aksinya and the reconciliation with his family and the village is accompanied by a return to the ideas of military duty and Cossack honour fostered in him from childhood.

Here begins the tragic story of a strong, volatile man’s harsh ordeals and painful vicissitudes in the vortex of the Civil War. Grigory’s soul becomes a battle ground where the great human truth being put into practice by the people in revolt is locked in a mortal combat with the dark, evil forces of the deep-rooted habits of the old world with its property interests and class feelings. The “self-willed and merry lad" traverses a terrible, thorny path, strewn with irreparable losses. The struggle against the people, against the great truth of life leads him on to an ignominious end. A tragic figure will stand before us amid the ruins of the old world, a broken man for whom there is no place in the life that is beginning.

4

p Grigory was to lose many fine human qualities from choosing the wrong path in the Revolution and finding himself at odds with the people. On his return to the war after resting at home and being thoroughly immersed in his Cossack world again, Grigory pals up with Uryupin. There are no longer the quarrels and incidents between them that there had been, and Uryupin’s influence is more clearly discernible in Grigory’s changed character and psychology. “The pain for other men ... had gone.” Grigory’s heart “had grown hard and coarse”, and suddenly we are struck by the painful realisation of the awful connection between the time-honoured Cossack way of life and traditions, and Uryupin’s degenerate^ inhuman philosophy. The reader suddenly finds himself associating the Melekhov family and their way of life with Uryupin and his heinous ideas.

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p Sholokhov’s remarkably skilful oblique characterisation is one of the chief attributes of his talent. While giving the reader much food for thought, he never hands out ready-made conclusions or presses his own opinions on him.

p We are told very little about Grigory’s life at the front after his return from leave. What we do know we learn from a few brief general accounts by the author or from Grigory’s reminiscences. The focus is on the changes that had taken place in Grigory’s character and outlook. “With cold contempt he played with his own and others’ lives.... But he knew that he no longer laughed as in former days; he knew his eyes were sunken and his cheekbones stood out sharply; he knew that if he kissed a child he could not look straight into those clear, innocent eyes. He knew what price he had paid for his crosses and medals" (2, 60). This was the Grigory that met the Revolution.

p But Garanzha had sown a live seed in his soul. Grigory did not forget the words of his intelligent, bitter room-mate in the hospital. Once he tried to explain the main essence of Garanzha’s teaching to Uryupin. As was to be expected, Uryupin expressed complete disagreement: “There’s no sense ever comes from these revolutions, only mischief. You remember this, that what we Cossacks need is our own government, and not any other! We need a strong tsar.... We’ve got nothing in common with the muzhiks....” (2, 62). He tried to persuade Grigory that the Cossacks had their own special interests to defend. But Grigory disagreed and complained that he “always thinks along one track" (2, 63).

Grigory tries to avoid adopting a parochial Cossack view of the future and take the wider interests of the people at large into account as Garanzha had taught him. Thus the way is paved for his going over to the Bolsheviks in the first months of the Revolution. He opposes Uryupin, this tsarist and inveterate defender of Cossack class privileges, though he does so weakly and vaguely, as if himself doubting the truth of what he is saying. This is the complex character Sholokhov creates for us: a man for numerous reasons prone to grave political doubts and hesitation, who has great difficulty in feeling his way amid the apparent chaos of the revolutionary upheavals.

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5

p The Great October Revolution and the Civil War that followed faced Grigory Melekhov with a serious dilemma: what direction should he take and with whom should he go along?

p The Bolsheviks brought peace to the war-weary country. Most of the front-line Cossacks were tired of the war and sided with them.

p At the outbreak of the Revolution Grigory’s sympathies for the Bolsheviks were still weak and little developed. He had never had any firm political convictions, nor was he to find any throughout the Civil War. His lack of firm social beliefs is revealed in the story of his relationships with two people—Lieutenant Izvarin and the revolutionary Cossack Poityolkov.

p Izvarin served in the same regiment as Grigory. Unlike Uryupin he was well-educated, widely read and an eloquent speaker, and he poisoned Grigory’s mind with the dangerous ideas of Cossack autonomy and separatism. Son of a well-to-do Cossack, he campaigned for the secession of the Don Province from revolutionary Russia. Grigory had heated arguments with him. How could the Don live without Russia, he wanted to know, when they had nothing except wheat. But Izvarin easily triumphed over the semi-literate Grigory in these verbal duels.

p It is notable that in their arguments both Izvarin and Melekhov treated the Cossacks as a single, united people apart and that neither of them saw them as being divided by class differences. This social blindness was indeed Grigory’s Achilles’ heel.

p Brought up in a traditional property society, Grigory is unable to grasp the completely new, unprecedented order on which the new society is to be built. He is unable to break out of that vicious circle of concepts of the life based on property relations which divides people into hostile classes.

p “If the Bolsheviks get the upper hand it will be good for the workers and bad for the rest. If the monarchy returns, it will be good for the landowners and suchlike and bad for the rest,” Izvarin impressed on Grigory (2, 252-253). “In real life it never works out that everybody 60 gets an equal share,” Izvarin had said, and Grigory was to repeat these words himself.

p Grigory came into contact with Fyodor Podtyolkov, then a sergeant-major in a Guards battery, but later to become the first chairman of the Don Revolutionary Committee. Grigory tries to give a paraphrase of Izvarin’s “autonomist” arguments, but Podtyolkov confounds him with the incontestable truth of his answers:

p “The atamans will go on just the same as before, oppressing the people who have to work. You will go before some ’Excellency’, and he’ll give you one on the snout. A fine life indeed! Better hang a mill-stone round your neck and jump into the river.... Once you’ve overthrown the tsar and the counter-revolution you must see the government passes into the hands of the people. That story about the old times is all fairy-tales. In the old days the tsars oppressed us, and now if the tsars don’t, somebody else will" (2, 257).

p There is confusion and unrest in the region. Kornilov’s Volunteer Army is being formed on the Don. In Novocherkasskataman Kaledin gathers units that have remained loyal to the old regime. At Kamenskaya, front-line Cossacks elect a Revolutionary Committee.

p Grigory Melekhov joins the struggle on the side of the Revolution. He commands a Red Guard detachment in the battle at Glubokaya against the forces of Chernetsov, composed mainly of officers, and has an important clash with Podtyolkov there. On Podtyolkov’s orders the Cossacks massacre Chernetsov and the officers taken prisoner. With his usual impetuosity Grigory challenges Podtyolkov.

p There is more than humaneness behind this instinctive movement: all his latent discontent is bursting to the surface.

p “He wanted to turn his back upon the whole hateriddled and incomprehensible world. Behind him everything was entangled, contradictory. The right path was difficult to trace; the ground quaked under his feet as in a bog, the path branched in many directions and he felt no confidence that he had chosen the right one. He had been drawn towards the Bolsheviks, had led others after him, then had hesitated, and his heart had cooled. ’Is Izvarin right after all? Who are we to trust?’" (2, 341).

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p It is in this tortured state of mind that Grigory returns home to recuperate after being wounded by a whiteguard bullet. The right path was indeed difficult to trace. He was to spend the whole Civil War trying to do so.

Grigory’s ignorance of the laws of historical development strengthens his aversion to the war and his longing to return to his home and his old life. His desire to retire from the struggle only arises when he finds himself at the cross roads and does not know which way to take. The vital question for us, therefore, in our examination of the ill-starred life of Grigory Melekhov, is what was it that made his search for the truth so difficult, that harrowed him and caused him to waver so?

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p Grigory Melekhov belonged to the “petty bourgeois or semi-petty bourgeois working masses" for whom vacillation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was inevitable. The outcome of the revolutionary struggle was finally decided, as Lenin pointed out, by these millions finally coming down on the side of the workers and poor peasants.

p “...And if anything decided the issue of the struggle against Kolchak and Denikin in our favour, despite the fact that they were supported by the Great Powers, it was that both the peasants and working Cossacks, who for a long time remained in the other camp, have in the end come over to the workers and peasants—and it was only this that finally decided the war and brought about our victory.”  [61•*  These words are from a speech Lenin addressed to working Cossacks in 1920. •

p By making the hero of his epic a man from a middlepeasant background Sholokhov was able to reveal one of the cardinal problems of the Revolution, and its great socio-political experience. His bold, fearless portrayal of the tragedy of a man from the people who was richly endowed by nature and should have allied himself with the revolutionary forces but failed to do so, was a revelation in our literature, for he was bringing layers of life to the surface which had been hardly touched upon before.

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p Lenin gave a very accurate definition of the contradictory nature of the peasant toiler: “The peasants are half labourers and half property-owners.”  [62•* 

p In Grigory Melekhov Sholokhov gives a penetrating psychological analysis of the struggle between deeprooted property habits and the affinities of the toiler.

p Throughout the Civil War Grigory remains firmly opposed to the idea of sharing out the Cossack land. As soon as the land is mentioned the property instinct comes out in him, the instinct to defend his property, if necessary with his life.

p Immediately after his return home from serving in the Red Guards Grigory tries to convince his father and Pyotr that land should be given to those “outsiders”, from other provinces who have been living on the Don for a long time. “I want a Soviet government,” he replies to his father’s question as to what side he is on (2, 352). Pantelei Prokofyevich, that firm limb of the Cossack law, explodes with anger, while Pyotr energetically tries to talk him round. The comfortable life at home (Sholokhov chooses his moment well to give an account of a fine spread in the Melekhov house) with its regular settled routine, the artless delight of the family when, yielding to Natalya’s entreaties, he wears his officer’s tunic and his crosses (“’You look like a colonel!’ Pyotr exclaimed in delight”) is irresistibly pleasant to Grigory, and awakens all his class and property feelings.

p These new feelings first burst forth shortly before the execution of Podtyolkov. The Cossack hierarchy are leading the Cossacks against Soviet power, against the Red Guard detachments retreating from the Ukraine. The White officers mobilise the Cossacks in many districts of the Don Province. Mikhail Koshevoi, Knave, Christonya and Grigory gather at Ivan Kotlyarov’s house. Mikhail and Knave propose that they go and join the Reds. Ivan Kotlyarov hesitates, for he has his family to think of. Grigory angrily opposes the idea, and when Knave went on to insist that they ought to leave, angrily cut him short: “Not so fast! Your position is different, there’s nothing to keep you, you can go where you like! But we’ve got to think it over carefully. I’ve got a wife and 63 two little children.... You can wag your tongue, you whipper-snapper! You’re just what you’ve always been. You’ve got,; nothing but your jacket to your name....” (2, 421-422). These are the haughty, angry vituperations of the Cossack with his own farm for whom the homeless, unfortunate Knave does not merit even the most basic human respect. It is significant here that the main pretext Grigory gives for not leaving is that he has his homestead and family to think of.

p Grigory had not wished to leave and join the Reds. Instead he fought for anti-revolutionary forces of the Don Army. Deceived by slogans calling for autonomy for the Don region the Cossacks rose against Soviet power.

p Grigory’s views undergo a sharp change at this point. He believes that he is fighting to defend the Cossack lands from the encroachments of the Tambov, Ryazan and Saratov muzhiks led by the Bolsheviks. Angered against the Bolsheviks he considers the counter-revolutionary struggle perfectly justified. But he sees that the majority of the Cossacks are little disposed to fight and are prepared to adopt a conciliatory attitude.

p The Red Army struck the Cossacks some hard blows and by the autumn of 1918 the front defended by ataman Krasnov’s whiteguard army was beginning to collapse. Whole groups of Cossacks deserted their detachments and returned home to wait uneasily on their farms for the arrival of the Red Army. Grigory also deserted and stayed on in the village to await further developments. It was not long before the Red Army was passing through Tatarsky, pursuing the fleeing White forces, and Soviet power was once more established on the Don.

p Everything that was fermenting inside Grigory, seething beneath the surface, was to burst forth in his conversation with Ivan Alexeyevich Kotlyarov, now Chairman of the village Revolutionary Committee. This frank confession was the result of long, painful meditations. The conversation revealed all Grigory’s inner contradictions, his inability to overcome his property and class interests. It represents a most important point on his tortuous path, throwing much light on his future, explaining a great deal.

p One winter’s evening Grigory dropped in at the headquarters of the District Revolutionary Committee, and 64 there ensued one of those scenes which Sholokhov handles so masterfully, where he brings characters together in a dramatic situation in which they naturally reveal to the reader many important features of their nature. In this case Sholokhov has brought together three old friends. Not so long before Grigory and Ivan Alexeyevich had refused to go off and join the Reds, giving the excuse that they had their families to think of. But even at the time Ivan Alexeyevich had had an uneasy sensation that he was not acting according to the dictates of his conscience. He guessed that with Grigory it was something else.... At the assembly that was held after the Reds came to the village, Grigory met Ivan Alexeyevich and his old friend Mikhail Koshevoi. Mikhail had worked as a drover and then been drafted into a disciplinary company, where he had been kept under close surveillance to prevent him from joining the Bolsheviks. The day before the Whites had abandoned the village Ivan Alexeyevich had gone out to meet the Reds and had come into the village with them. Grigory had deserted his regiment, staying on at home. “How is it you stayed behind, Grigory?" Ivan Alexeyevich had asked, his friendly tone betraying sincere concern for Grigory. “And how about you?" was Grigory’s answer. “Thinking of my commission? I risked it and stayed on here. I nearly got killed yesterday.... I was sorry I hadn’t cleared out. But now I’m not sorry....”

p “We should have cleared off to the Reds when we had the chance. We wouldn’t be looking so silly now if we had,” Ivan Alexeyevich added (3, 189). He had understood his mistake and was trying to make amends for it. But it has not even crossed Grigory’s mind that he had chosen a dangerous, slippery path right back at the time of Podtyolkov’s execution.

p Now, in January 1919, Grigory meets Ivan Alexeyevich and Mikhail Koshevoi with his ideas already matured. He speaks directly, with an almost desperate frankness, for Kotlyarov and Koshevoi are as yet people in whom he can confide, and he may even be secretly hoping that they might be in sympathy with his views. Grigory asks Ivan Alexeyevich what the Bolsheviks are giving the Cossacks. “Are they giving us the land? Or liberty? Are they making everyone equal? We’ve got enough land 65 to choke ourselves with already. And we don’t want any more liberty or we’ll be knifing each other in the streets. We used to elect our own atamans, but now they’re set over us. This government will bring the Cossacks nothing but ruin. It’s a peasants’ government, and we don’t need it. And we don’t need the generals either. The Communists and the generals are all alike: they’re all yokes on our necks" (3, 210-211).

p Grigory had become a firm supporter of Cossack separatism. He tries to substantiate the idea of the special position of the Cossacks as a class apart, united in their outlook and aspirations.

p Ivan Alexeyevich is a simple, semi-literate Cossack, groping his way towards the great social truth of life, following what his heart tells him to be right. He answers Grigory with firm conviction:

p “‘The rich Cossacks don’t need it, but how about the others? You fool! There are three rich Cossacks in the village, and how many poor? And what will you do with the labourers? No, we can’t take your view of it. Let the rich Cossacks give up a bit of their own wealth and pass it on to the poor. And if they won’t, we’ll take it, with their flesh as well! We’ve had enough of their lording it over us! They stole the land.’

p “’Not stole it, but conquered it. Our forefathers poured out their blood for it, and maybe that’s why the earth is so fruitful....’"

p It is significant that Grigory should try to find an explanation and justification for the special class position of the Cossacks by referring to those far-off days. For the autonomists glossed over the present social class structure of Cossack life with legends of the past. Ivan Alexeyevich makes short work of Grigory’s arguments: “That doesn’t make any difference; they must share it with those who need it. But you—you’re like the weathercock on a roof. You turn with the wind. Such men as you cause trouble" (3, 211).

p Ivan Alexeyevich, who had opposed the imperialist war at the front and raised a Cossack squadron against Kornilov, and was thus not without political experience, faces Grigory with the simple fact that the Cossacks do not constitute a single class. “There are all sorts of Cossacks,” he points out.

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p Grigory is unwilling rather than unable to see this. For him the Cossacks are a united whole, with their own special interests. This is what enables him to believe in the possibility of the Cossacks having their own special path in the Revolution. Ivan Alexeyevich does not pull his punches, but points out to Grigory the way his special, “third” way inevitably leads.

p “It’s a long time since I saw you last and I won’t deny that you’ve changed. You are an enemy of the Soviet Government,” he says tersely. But he cannot bring himself to raise his eyes and look Grigory in the face, in view of his lingering attachment to him.

p “I don’t think you used to hold those views,” Mikhail Koshevoi had remarked at the beginning of the conversation with the deliberate intention of wounding Grigory with the memory of the time when he had fought for the Reds. From then on he listened in silence but with mounting anger against his former friend.

p These three Cossacks are three very different individuals. Despite the apparent similarity of their social position, and the fact that they felt the same about most things not so long before, a clear distinction in their class sympathies has now become apparent and, more important, they are divided over the most fundamental thing, what they understand by the truth and the meaning of life. In their heart of hearts Ivan Alexeyevich and Mikhail Koshevoi were toilers, and their feelings as such put them on the side of the revolutionary people of Russia, whereas Grigory had property class prejudices.

p Ivan Alexeyevich chose the right path in the complex situation at the beginning of the Civil War and refuses to be turned away from it by anybody. He found the true way only after hard experience and much thought, and once he has found it he is ready to stick to it to the death if necessary. This simple, semi-educated man was head and shoulders above Grigory. He had risen to the noble humanistic awareness of the need to share other people’s burdens and difficulties. He is constantly concerned for the workers, the poor and hungry, for all oppressed mankind. The way ahead is also clear to Koshevoi. He is filled with hatred for Grigory, who is attacking what is dearest to him, the Soviet, working 67 people’s government which he serves with all his heart and soul.

After the conversation Grigory continued to be tortured by the same doubts: “There’s not one truth in this life. The one who wins eats the one who doesn’t. And I’ve been looking for a truth that doesn’t exist, wearing my heart out over it, going from one to the other. In the old days, they say, the Tatars tried to grab the Don lands and make us slaves. And now it’s Russia. There can be no peace with them! They are foreign to me and to all the Cossacks" (3, 216).

7

p By the time the Veshenskaya counter-revolutionary uprising broke out in the rear of the Red Army in February 1919, Grigory had weighed and decided everything. We see an embittered man furiously defending the world of private property which he realises is being threatened. All his former hesitations and doubts evaporate and he cannot even understand what there had been to think about.

p “What had there been to think about? Why had his spirit tossed like a hunted wolf in search of a way of escape, of solving contradictions? Life seemed absurdly, wisely simple. Now he believed that there never had been any truth under whose wing all might shelter; now he thought that each had his own truth, his own furrow. For a piece of bread, for a strip of earth, for the right to live, men always had fought and always would fight so long as the sun shone on them, so long as the blood flowed warm in their veins__

p “The path of the Cossacks had crossed the path of the landless peasantry of Russia, the path of the factory people. Fight them to the death! Wrest from them the rich Don earth, washed with Cossack blood. Drive them as once the Tatars had been driven beyond the borders of the province. Strike Moscow, fasten a shameful peace on them!" (3, 259, 260).

p In this reasoning of an enraged property owner whose interests are being threatened we hear centuries of falsehood, the voice of that passing world where it is every 68 man for himself and man preys on man. The seeds Izvarin had sown in Grigory’s heart had taken well and were bearing fruit. He accepted Izvarin’s false credo as the truth, attracted by the fact that it seemed to offer the possibility of a third path in the Revolution.

p The Veshenskaya uprising, in which a large number of the Upper Don Cossacks for a variety of reasons took part, seemed to confirm Grigory’s attitude. The Cossacks appeared to be opposed to both the Whites and the Communists, with their kulak Socialist-Revolutionary battle slogan “For Soviet Power Without the Communists!" The fighting took place in the rear of the Red Army and had no connection with White Army forces. The insurgents continued to use “Comrade” as the common form of address, a sort of “Cossack Republic" was set up, and Grigory felt that his path in the Revolution was henceforth clear. This mistaken conviction was all the stronger in him in the early days of the uprising because he felt he had merged with the Cossack masses. He had never sought for a personal truth, but for a truth under] whose wing all the Cossacks might shelter. It is because he sees himself as defending Cossack interests that he throws himself with such desperate fervour into the thick of the conflict.

p As commander of an insurgent division Grigory would seem to have definitely chosen his path. His grief and bitterness when he learns his brother Pyotr has been shot by Mikhail Koshevoi is such that it is as if nothing could ever reconcile him with his brother’s killers. In this scene Sholokhov makes the reader feel all the power of those complex circumstances which bind Grigory to the past. Grigory’s behaviour was not only influenced by class feelings but also by considerations of family loyalty: combined, they led him to defend that order which was crumbling under the blows of historical necessity.

p The hard school of experience, however, soon revealed the true nature of the events taking place, whom and what interests Grigory was really serving when he led the Cossacks into battle. It is not long before he is seized by fresh doubts as to whether he has after all chosen the right road, and he has “a rebellious feeling of the injustice of his cause".

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p This feeling arises after Grigory has been questioning a captured Cossack who had fought for the Reds. He had originally ordered him to be executed, but taking pity on him had had him released.

p Anxiety and caustic bitterness stir within him blotting out the self-satisfied joy he feels as he watches the dense lines of horsemen, his men, streaming past him. He is suddenly struck by the thought: “And above all... who am I leading them against? Against the people.... But who is right?”

p “The intoxicating strength of power faded from his eyes, and the anxiety and bitterness remained, bowing his shoulders with their unbearable heaviness" (3, 302),

p So it is that, as a result of his experiences, Grigory is once more assailed by indecision and painful doubts. At the insurgents’ headquarters he meets a Cossack who has come from Alexeyevskaya stanitsa to apply for help in raising the Cossacks there against Soviet power. “If we had sent you troops, would you have risen? All of you?" Grigory asks. His question betrays the doubt that was torturing him, which gave him no rest. His insistence on the word “all” immediately gives the reader a clear insight into the direction his thoughts were taking. The Cossack’s answer only confirms Grigory’s doubts: “Well, I don’t know about that.... The good farmers would, of course.” “What about the poor?" Grigory insists, and the way he continues to question the man after Kudinov, the insurgents’ commander, had rudely told him to go back whence he came, reveals how deeply concerned he was. As to whether the poor would rise or not the man answers: “The loafers, you mean, why the devil should they rise? This government’s just the thing for them, a real holiday!" (3, 317). Grigory frowns thoughtfully.

p Kudinov introduces Grigory to “Comrade” Georgidze who also works at the insurgents’ headquarters. “He’s a lieutenant-colonel and he’s been through a staff training college.” Grigory feels a vague inward anxiety and causeless anger. Suddenly he guesses the truth. “What if the Cadets purposely left these educated officers with us in order to stir up revolt in the rear of the Reds and to guide us along their own way?...” (3, 325). It is not long before Grigory’s suspicions are confirmed.

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p Sholokhov reveals all these transitions and inward struggles indirectly through the events described. The important role the latter play in bringing out the inner workings of a character’s mind is typical of Sholokhov, who skilfully chooses the most historically relevant and representative events with this in view. The chain of inner feelings and ideas is closely interwoven with the action. Thus Grigory’s talk with the Cossack at staff headquarters serves to reveal thoughts which are going on so deep down in Grigory’s consciousness that he himself is not all the time fully aware of them. They are disclosed not by direct description of the hero’s inner life, but in a more complex, roundabout way, through such outward signs as the tone and sequence of his questions, the causeless anxiety and anger he feels when he shakes hands with the whiteguard lieutenant-colonel, and so on.

p Sholokhov does not only show how various thoughts and feelings arise: he also reveals the social causes that give rise to them. Grigory feels great hostility towards the gentleman colonel whose presence at the headquarters worries and angers him, for he has no wish to serve the Cadets. He plies the Cossack with questions—he would like to believe that the Cossacks have their own Cossack truth, that he is serving it and it alone. But he is tormented by doubts, and in a drunken conversation with a friend, all that is simmering inside him suddenly bursts forth: “We’ll kill the colonel. He stayed behind on purpose.... Kharlampy! Let’s give in to the Soviet Government. We’re in the wrong" (3, 355).

It is these feelings that lead Grigory to understand that the cause he is fighting for is anti-popular and provoke his admission to Kudinov: “I think we went wrong when we began the rising" (3, 325).

8

p The struggle against the people in the camp of the counter-revolutionaries brings Grigory to moral bankruptcy and he seeks escape from reality and his painful, tormenting doubts in drink.

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p “After four days of incessant carousing he began to show signs of its effects: he went baggy and blue under the eyes, and his glance was senselessly stern" (3, 351).

p Even Ilyinichna’s patient, long-suffering maternal heart is moved to speak. As he goes back to the front when his leave is over, she makes the sign of the cross, and kissing him says reproachfully: “Grigory, think what you’re doing! Look what fine children you’ve got, and perhaps those you killed had children too. When you were a lad you were so gentle, but now you’re always frowning and your heart must be like a wolf’s. Listen to what your mother says, Grigory" (3, 428).

p Out of boundless maternal love the old woman had addressed these sharp words of criticism to her youngest son. How many sleepless nights and suffering had driven her to utter these words to which Grigory responded with a cheerless smile!

p The struggle against the people has atrophied many of Grigory’s finer feelings. When reproaching him with having been unfaithful Natalya says, “Aren’t you ashamed?”, Grigory smiles as if she is being childishly naive and exclaims: “Huh! Ashamed!... I’ve forgotten how to be ashamed. How can you feel shame when all your life’s messed up? There you are killing people. You don’t know what all the mess is about....” (3, 392).

p This man who loved life so was gripped by such a feeling of futility that his own very existence seemed completely pointless.

p “...Grigory thought with sober indifference: ’I’ve lived and experienced everything in my day. I’ve loved women and girls, I’ve ridden the steppe, I’ve rejoiced in fatherhood, I’ve killed men and faced death myself, and delighted in the blue sky. What new thing can life show me? Nothing! And I can die! It won’t be so terrible. I can play at war without risk, like a rich man gambling. My loss won’t be so great’" (3, 359).

p There is a mortal weariness, a terrible indifference in these thoughts. He returns again and again to thoughts of death which sap all his vital energy. He looks on death without bitterness or regret, as a relief from his errors and delusions.

p More and more frequently Grigory’s near and dear ones compare him to a wolf. For both Sholokhov himself and 72 his heroes, the words “wolf”, “wolf-like” have the force of a sharp moral condemnation. Grigory himself had said to Pyotr during the imperialist war: “They’ve set us fighting one another, worse than a pack of wolves. Hatred everywhere" (1, 404). And now he is being likened to a wolf.

p In a cri-du-coeur his mother says his heart “must be like a wolf’s”, and his sister Dunya feels the same. By likening Grigory to a wolf Sholokhov forcefully accentuates the whole tragedy of the soul-destroying changes that take place in him. He resorts to this motif at the time of^the Veshenskaya uprising, when Grigory is struggling most actively against Soviet power, abandons it when his feelings as a toiler get the upper hand again, to return to it in the last part of the novel, where it rings more strongly than ever while Grigory is fighting in Fomin’s band. Sholokhov uses this wolf motif to typify the evil class feelings which so mar the nature of this tragically misguided man- from the people.

p In a terrible frenzy, in the heat of battle, Grigory cut down four sailors. For the first time in his life he collapses in a fit.

p “...In a moment of horrible clarity of mind, he tried to get up. But it was no use and, turning his tear-stained, distorted face to the Cossacks standing around him, he shouted in a broken, savage voice:

p “’Who have I killed?’

p “For the first time in his life he writhed in a fit, shouting and spitting foam from his lips:

p “’Brothers, there’s no forgiveness for me.... Kill me.... Cut me down, for the love of God! Death... put me to death....’" (3, 367).

p In this moment of lucidity Grigory condemns himself and the struggle he is waging against the people.

p Like retribution, out of the blue, a terrible, sharp pain grips his heart, everything goes dark before his eyes and the ground seems to slip away beneath his feet. Grigory can find no rest, no escape from his tormenting thoughts. He no longer believes in the justice of what he is doing, and is gripped by a vague remorse, an intuitive sense of guilt.

p “...You never think what it is that’s gnawing at my heart, sucking my blood.... Life’s taken a false turn, 73 and maybe I’m at fault in that too.... We ought to make peace with the Reds and attack the Cadets. But how? Who will bring us into touch with the Soviets?" (3, 392).

p Grigory is wrestling desperately with contradictions which are insoluble for him. There is a deeply tragic note in his words to Natalya: “I hardly care for the children and I haven’t a thought for myself. The war’s dried it all out of me. I’ve grown hard.... Look into my soul and you’ll find it’s black as an empty well....” (3, 393).

The words “empty” and “black” intrude again and again in Grigory’s thoughts and speech. When he thinks or speaks about himself he can find no more fitting words than these to express his bitter, painful thoughts. Grigory Melekhov’s soul had indeed become black and empty.

9

p Losses, changes and painful inward struggles all leave their mark on a man. Sholokhov reveals the hidden mechanism of his hero’s progress towards spiritual bankruptcy, the external signs of which are so obvious, with merciless truth. The constant interaction of what is going on deep down inside a character and his outward behaviour, gives Sholokhov’s novel its characteristic dynamic unity. He has a rare talent for showing man in constant motion. By capturing a character’s essence at every given moment with such remarkable truthfulness, he is at the same time conveying his changeability. We see before us man as a traveller on the road of this bitter-sweet life with all its ups and downs.

p Not so long ago we saw Grigory as a youth “with his youthfully thin, round neck and the unconcerned fold of his continually smiling lips”. With the passing years, in the trials of battle and everyday life, we see him change before our very eyes and become “the manful giant of a Cossack who had lived through and experienced so much, with eyes puckered wearily, with rusty tips to his black moustache, a premature greyness at the temples, and deep furrows on the forehead....” (4, 12).

p Sholokhov is a past master of the art of portraiture which has long been an important feature of Russian prose. A. S. Serafimovich was the first to point out this side of his talent. In 1928 he wrote: “He doesn’t ‘write 74 in’ characters like so many carefully drawn sketches. People spill out into the pages of his book like a lively, colourful crowd, where every individual has his own nose, his own wrinkles, his own eyes with their crow’s feet, his own accent, and walks and turns his head in his own particular way.”  [74•* 

p In realist art portraiture in the widest sense of the word—which is far more than a mere description of outward features—is used as an important means of individualising characters. We cannot imagine the Russian novel with its penetrating psychological studies without portraiture.

p In the literature of the 19th century the description of the hero on his very first appearance often gave the reader an insight into his personality. The Russian novelists strove to capture the essence of the hero’s personality through outward features.

p Today a novelist would hardly begin with a detailed description of a character’s appearance, how he is dressed, his age, etc.

p “One cannot make a ten-page portrait of a hero, give his appearance and size, and say what sort of a person he is, and then let him start to act. This is the wrong method to employ,” declares Alexei Tolstoi. “It is quite static, whereas a hero’s portrait should come from the action, from struggles and conflicts, from the way he behaves. The portrait gradually takes shape from the lines and between the lines, between the words, emerging gradually, and the reader can imagine it for himself without any description.”  [74•** 

p Thus the portrait does not anticipate events, but takes shape out of them. We are more interested in what a man looked like in given circumstances, when our interest has already been caught.

p The portrait is built up like a mosaic in the course of the development of the action. The undoubted importance which drama plays in the modern novel can be clearly seen here.

p Obviously one cannot talk of a law in all this, but such is apparently the general trend.

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p There has been a fundamental change in the opening of the narrative, representing a swing in the direction of greater dynamism. Accordingly, And Quiet Flows the Don opens with the account of Prokofy Melekhov’s return from war with a Turkish wife, and only after this dramatic introduction are we treated to a condensed description of the Melekhov family. “And that was how the hook-nosed, savagely handsome Cossack family of Melekhovs, nicknamed ’Turks’, came into the village.”

p In the first description of the Melekhov family the author makes no attempt to paint a detailed family portrait like on a canvas, where all members of the family would be given equal importance.

p “Under the weight of the passing years Pantelei Prokofyevich grew gnarled and craggy; he broadened and acquired a stoop, but still looked a well-built old man. He was dry of bone, and lame (in his youth he had broken his leg while hurdling at an Imperial Review of troops), he wore a silver half-moon ear-ring in his left ear, and his beard and hair retained their vivid raven hue until old age. When angry, he completely lost control of himself and undoubtedly this had prematurely aged his buxom wife, whose face, once beautiful, was now a perfect spiderweb of furrows.

p “Pyotr, his elder, married son, took after his mother: stocky and snub-nosed, a luxuriant shock of corn-coloured hair, hazel eyes. But the younger, Grigory, was like his father: half a head taller than Pyotr, some six years younger, the same pendulous hawk nose as his father’s, the whites of his burning eyes bluish in their slightly oblique slits; brown, ruddy skin drawn tight over angular cheek-bones. Grigory stooped slightly, just like his father; even in his smile there was a similar, rather savage quality" (1, 15-16).

p In the family portrait of the Melekhovs, Ilyinichna, Pyotr, Dunya, and especially Darya (Pyotr’s wife), are all pale and sketchy beside the powerful figures of Pantelei Prokofyevich and Grigory, largely because it is not a self-contained episode, but evolves out of the course of events, being dictated by the story of Prokofy Melekhov’s marriage with the Turkish woman and the extraordinary circumstances of their son’s birth, which requires a sequel. Describing the Melekhovs as they have 76 become many years later, the author puts the spotlight on Pantelei Prokofyevich and Grigory, who are the most truly representative members of the family.

p The very term “portraiture” implies the presence of features which force us to speak in terms of the writer’s talent for “painting”, in terms of colour and tone, vividness, etc. And indeed the writer depicting a character’s outward appearance has essentially the same artistic aims as the artist painting a picture. Both try to create an illusion of life, to capture their characters’ constantly changing inner world and outward appearance. The writer is almost bound to resort to the idiom of painting, to such means as colour, chiaroscuro and so on.

p A perfect example of a modern Soviet writer who consciously aims at this is Konstantin Fedin, whose characters are depicted as vividly as if they had been painted on an artist’s canvas. This is amply illustrated by the following portrait from Early Joys, where Tsvetukhin and Pastukhov spring to life as if at the strokes of an artist’s brush: “The first to alight wore a black cape fastened with a gilt chain with lion-head clasps and a soft black felt hat that gleamed like a raven’s wing. He himself was dark-complexioned, with a clipped moustache as black as tar. The second was dressed casually in a pea-green summer coat with a light nap and a sandcoloured felt hat with a lilac ribbon. His face, slightly flabby and complacent but still young and well cared for, looked as though it had been tinted with pastels and gave the same impression of lightness and showiness as his clothes.”  [76•* 

p Fedin describes his heroes’ outward appearance largely in terms of light and colour, dwelling on the colour of their clothes with loving attention. With the trained eye of an artist, he picks out the pattern of light and shade that plays on an object or a person and, fully aware of its expressiveness, uses it with consummate skill for purely literary, narrative purposes.

p Fedin’s mastery of colour and light effects is so delightfully entrancing in that it testifies to the truly unlimited power of words.

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p Another great modern novelist, Alexei Tolstoi, saw man in constant motion. His portraits are never isolated still-lifes, “in camera miniatures" so to speak, but take shape organically out of the action. He “inscribes” his characters in a particular milieu, space, etc., with amazing skill.

p A perfect illustration of this is provided by the description in his novel Peter the Great of the arrival of Sanka Volkova—a woman whom fortune has raised from a tumble-down village hovel to boyafs’ halls—at the Buinosov mansion. Note the manner the author has chosen to describe her entrance, dress, and the impression she produces on the ancient, arrogant and not very clever family.

p “The valet opened the door (an old-fashioned one, low and narrow), and a pink-gold dress rustled. A pair of bare shoulders were thrust forward, and then head back, a look of indifference on her beautiful face, eyelids lowered, boyarinya Volkova entered. She stood in the middle of the hall. Her rings flashed as she grasped her abundant skirts, lace-trimmed and sewn with roses, and advancing one foot—a satin slipper with a three-inch heel—she made a French curtsey keeping her forward leg straight. Her powdered coiffure with the ostrich feathers swayed from side to side. When she had done, she raised her blue eyes, smiled revealing her teeth and said: ’Bonjour Princesse’".

p It would be difficult to imagine a more thorough description of her appearance, clothes, behaviour, etc. Sanka stands before us, completely alive from her powdered coiffure with the high ostrich feathers to the tip of her satin slippers with their high French heels.

p But this is all revealed through the kaleidoscope of a swift succession of actions. It is a far cry^from those portraits where the artist paints a model who is “sitting” for him, so to speak.

p The reader is not an outside spectator viewing a canvas portrait of Sanka. The succession of the poses, and the spacial depth achieved give the reader a physical sensation of movement taking place before his very eyes. In describing Sanka’s entry to the Buinosov house, the author seizes on various portrait details. They are determined by space, the surroundings, the historical features of the place and so on.

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p Fedin’s and Tolstoi’s character-studies are calculated above all to produce a visual effect, and this is what makes it possible to speak of I hern being essentially linked to painting. But while Fedin gives a precise, detailed description of a character in a particular position (mainly in terms of colour, and chiaroscuro), Alexei Tolstoi sees his characters in a rapid succession of positions, each of which reveals a certain pictorial detail and which taken together give a very dynamic portrait. Sholokhov’s art is also visual. He tries to give a striking picture of man in motion. But he not only “paints”, he describes a character too. Even where his art is most pictorial, it is almost always a penetrating psychological study at the same time. He is not only interested in giving an expressive portrayal of a character’s outward appearance, but in revealing the way he behaves, his general temperament, his mood at a particular moment. Sholokhov’s portraits are of a man in a certain situation, mood and so on.

p In that first family portrait of the Melekhovs which we have already referred to, the author is not only striving to produce a strong visual impression, giving the reader a vision of each member; he is at the same time revealing their nature.

p When Pantelei Prokofyevich, for example^ is presented to us, we are not merely told what he looks like (“He was dry of bone, and lame ... he wore a silver half-moon ear-ring in his left ear" and so on), but are given the key to his very nature, to the way he behaves in all sorts of different situations. “When angry, he completely lost control of himself and undoubtedly this had prematurely aged his buxom wife, whose face, once beautiful, was now a perfect spiderweb of furrows.” This is more than a reference to strained family relations or an explanation of the premature wrinkles on Ilyinichna’s face: it is a purely psychological detail which is an essential part of the portrait of Pantelei Prokofyevich.

p In his Diary of Youth, the young Lev Tolstoi wrote: “Strictly speaking it is impossible to describe a man, but it is possible to describe the impression he has made on me.”

p Tolstoi was apparently trying to draw a line for himself between the methods the portrait painter has at 79 his disposal and those open to the writer. Yet when reading Lev Tolstoi, Sholokhov, Alexei Tolstoi, Konstantin Fedin, one feels they are painting with words, and are as much masters of colour as the painter.

p Obviously Lev Tolstoi’s formula does not cover the portraits he drew of his characters, any more than it does in the case of many other great writers, Dostoyevsky for example. But it does express what Tolstoi and many others were striving to achieve in their portraits.

p Sholokhov’s approach to character-description is rather similar to Lev Tolstoi’s. It is not only the outward appearance of a man that interests him but what Tolstoi loosely called “the impression he has made on me".

p Sholokhov’s portraits of his heroes are almost always imbued with a particular mood, a definite feeling, and possess to a large extent what we might well call a psychological descriptive element.

p This is well illustrated by the scene where Aksinya sees a wagon draw up in the Melekhovs’ yard with Grigory lying in it, and does not know whether he is dead or alive. “There was not a drop of blood in Aksinya’s white face. She was standing leaning against the wattle fence, her hands hanging lifelessly. No tears glittered in her misted black eyes, but there were so much suffering and dumb entreaty in them that Dunya halted for a second and said reluctantly... ’He’s alive, alive!’" (4, 328-329).

p The shock Aksinya receives is not only expressed outwardly (in her paling, her hands dangling lifelessly, etc.). The purely pictorial touch “no tears glittered in her misted black eyes" is but a preamble to a powerful direct description of Aksinya’s feelings as reflected in her eyes: “there were so much suffering and dumb entreaty....”

p Alexei Tolstoi, to take an example, usually avoids such psychological details in his portraits. He apparently holds that characters’ inner drama can and ought to be revealed in their movements, what they say, etc. Take the scene where Peter I is paying his last respects to the dead Lefort. “He stood there for a long time, one hand resting on the edge of the coffin. He bent and kissed his beloved friend’s brow and hands. His shoulders began to tremble beneath the green caftan, the nape of his neck stiffened.... He left the dais weeping like a child, and stopped before Sanka. She nodded sadly. ‘There’ll never 80 be another friend like him,’ he said. He buried his face in his hands, and shook his curly hair tousled from the journey. ’We shared everything, joys and sorrows. We thought with the same mind....’"

p Sholokhov, on the contrary, describes both a character’s feelings and their outward expression. Sholokhov’s predilection for psychological details in his portraits links him to the Tolstoian tradition.

p The outward appearance of a character will only be impressed on the reader’s memory if the writer manages to seize on those features which are most typical and permanent. It is not merely a question of purely outward features, though they have their place in the portrait. Aksinya’s plump figure and the fine, fluffy curls on her neck, Grigory’s swarthy face and hawk nose, Pyotr’s corn-coloured hair, and Khristonya’s enormous size and deep, rumbling bass voice are all details which help to make the characters stick in the reader’s mind. The younger Sholokhov was often not averse to introducing bizarre details, although, for example, Pantelei Prokofyevich’s half-moon ear-ring does not glitter on the pages of the book for long. With his]remarkable’ability to penetrate deep into the minds and feelings of his characters, Sholokhov would think nothing of abandoning a striking detail once it had ceased to have any essential importance. What was the point of the ear-ring? It really serves to stress the oriental streak in Pantelei Prokofyevich, and has no psychological significance. The oriental in Pantelei Prokofyevich is much more in evidence in his quick temper, the way he completely lost control of himself when angry—characteristics inherited by Grigory and Dunya and even little Mishatka.

p Obviously such typical outward features as Aksinya’s plumpness, Grigory’s swarthy face and Pantelei Prokofyevich’s limp have nothing to do with the characters’ psychology. A lot would be lost if a writer tried to gear all the features of his heroes’ outward appearance to their character.

p The dynamics of Sholokhov’s portraits lies in the subtle interplay of outward and inner features. He specially and consistently singles out those essential outward features which best correspond to a character’s inner nature.

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p The most striking feature of Aksinya’s appearance are her black eyes. But they are never described purely in terms of colour. Now they smoulder with the consuming fire of passion and love for Grigory, now they are “sprinkled with the ash of fear”, and so on. The expression in Aksinya’s eyes reveals one of the most important essential features of her nature—her passion, her fiery temper.

p Like Fedin, Sholokhov is fond of using colour when he comes to describe eyes. But in doing so, he almost invariably adds some psychological detail which gives us a deep insight into the character’s nature.

p The art of character-drawing is particularly difficult in a complex epic narrative. The heroes are often absent from the scene for a long time, yet somehow the reader must not be allowed to forget them. There is no need for the author to describe them each time they reappear however, as long as he reminds the reader of their most typical features. Often just one particular detail is sufficient for the character to spring immediately to mind again.

p One of the chief methods used in And Quiet Flows the Don in the case of the Melekhovs, is the insistence on common family traits. Again and again we are reminded of Grigory’s “burning eyes bluish in their slightly oblique slits”, his pendulous hawk nose, his stoop, his angular face, his rather savage smile. The repetition of these details in all sorts of situations impresses them on the reader’s memory, making the character extraordinarily familiar, almost physically tangible.

p Dunya too is described on several occasions as having the Melekhov family features. “Dunya was like her father, dark and sturdy. She was fifteen now, her figure still girlish and angular ... her black eyes in their long, rather slanting sockets, still sparkled bashfully and mischievously" (1, 315-316).

p We are also frequently reminded of the family likeness in the descriptions of little Mishatka, Grigory’s son. “The little boy, with morose eyes and knitted brows, was cast in the Melekhov mould: the same long slits of black, rather sombre eyes, blue prominent whites, the spreading line of brows, and swarthy skin" (2, 346) and later: “Sullen, with the Melekhovs’ ungracious look" (4, 234).

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p The constant repetition of the Melekhov family features in Grigory, Duiiya and Mishatka, just as the insistence on such characteristic details as Pantelei Prokofyevich’s limp, Aksinya’s plump figure and black eyes, Darya’s line eyebrows, Listiiitsky’s soft plump chest and so on, is only one element of the character-drawing in the novel, though of course a very important one. But perhaps even more important is the way the author concentrates on the changes that take place in a character as a result of his experiences.

p After recovering from a serious illness, Grigory looks on the world around him as if discovering it anew. “With eyes expressing a slight astonishment he gazed at the new world which had been revealed to him; a simple, childlike smile hovered on his face, in strange contrast to his harsh features, to the expression of his animal-like eyes, and softening the harsh folds at the corners of his lips" (4, 330).

p The only characteristic feature remaining is “his animal-like eyes”. The rest are new traits resulting from what he has been through (“the harsh features”, “the harsh folds at the corners of his lips”), or details which reflect his actual mood (“eyes expressing a slight astonishment”, “simple, childlike smile”, etc.).

p Sholokhov’s descriptions of Grigory usually combine typical, permanent features with outward signs of deep changes, the description of these outward signs serving to supplement and clarify the psychological details and give the reader a deep insight into the workings of the character’s mind. In fact Sholokhov describes the hero’s outward appearance most often when he wants to draw our attention to a particularly important state of mind.

p After his first battle in the imperialist war Grigory was tormented by a dreary inward pain. Try as he may, he could not forget the Austrian he had killed. “‘Pyotr, I’m played out,’ he tells his brother. ’I’m like a man who only needs one more blow to kill him....’ His voice was cracked and complaining, and a dark furrow (only now, and with a feeling of anxiety, did Pyotr notice it) slanting diagonally across his forehead, made a startling impression of change and alienation" (1, 403).

p The furrow that Pyotr noticed with such anxiety was 83 the visible expression of Grigory’s spiritual crisis in the first months of the war.

p A character’s appearance may be described in various ways: direct narration by the author; through his own eyes (as in Gorky’s Life of Klim Samgin, where the hero frequently looks at himself in the mirror); as seen by other characters. The latter approach makes for a highly emotion-charged description.

p What makes the furrow across Grigory’s forehead the powerful descriptive detail is the way it goes to his brother Pyotr’s heart and the fact that it appears in an emotion-charged psychological context (Grigory’s cracked, complaining voice, Pyotr’s feeling of anxiety and so on) which reveals the hero’s state of mind.

p As events unfold dramatic tension builds up in the descriptions of Grigory Melekhov. In depicting Grigory at the beginning of the Civil War, Grigory taking part in the Veshenskaya uprising, or fighting in Fomin’s band against the young Soviet state, Sholokhov sadly recounts the vacillations, and grave changes for the worse of his hero.

p More and more frequently the words “harsh”, “malicious”, and “cruel” occur in descriptions of Grigory’s face, particularly his eyes. With time they become characteristic features of the greatly changed Grigory who has so often shed the blood of working people and Red Army men, the fighters for Soviet power.

p “There was a harsh expression on his sunburnt face, with its cheekbones covered with an unhealthy fullness of flesh. Stretching his dark muscular neck, he thoughtfully twisted the end of his sun-bleached moustache and stared fixedly at the wall with eyes grown cold and bitter during these past few years" (3, 123-124. Author’s italics).

p The changes years of bitter fighting have wrought in Grigory’s appearance are referred to again and again: “the bags under his eyes”, “the spark of senseless cruelty in his eyes”, “his deathly pale face with its unwinking, staring gaze" which the Cossack woman watches “with loathing and pity”, “his tired, drooping eyes”, “the prematurely grey hair round his temples".

p More and more attention is focussed on the inner changes as reflected in Grigory’s outward appearance, while the purely descriptive details of his outward appearance gradually fade into the background.

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p One of the last descriptions we have of Grigory is after he has run away from Fomin’s band. His joining the band was a most fatal mistake which brought him so low that it would be practically impossible ever to rise again. Looking at him while he slept, Aksinya sees not the man whom she had known so well, and who was so close, so dear to her, but a total stranger, harsh and frightening.

p “His black lashes, their tips bleached by the sun, quivered very gently; his upper lip stirred, revealing his firm clenched white teeth. She looked at him more closely and only then noticed how much he had changed during the past few months of their separation. There was a harsh, almost cruel expression in the deep vertical furrows between his brows, in the folds of his mouth, in the prominent cheekbones. And for the first time it occurred to her that he must be terrible in battle, on a horse, with bared sabre. Lowering her eyes, she glanced at his big knotty hands and sighed for some reason" (4, 676-677).

p Sholokhov gives a ruthlessly realistic portrait of this Grigory, with his firm clenched white teeth bared and his big knotty hands, which not so long before had grasped the plough, but were now those of a bandit; but for Aksinya’s feelings as she looks mournfully at him, it would indeed be a cruel portrait....

p Very little remains of Grigory’s many fine, outstanding qualities. They seem to have vanished to be replaced by the terrible marks left by time and the changes tragic experience has wrought.

p Grigory’s descent along the sloping path towards moral bankruptcy, which Sholokhov reveals with such power in his hero’s outward appearance, makes him age disastrously quickly. We are shown this through the eyes of his near and dear ones, his sister Dunya and Aksinya, who think and speak of it with pain and sorrow.

p “’Oh, but you’ve grown old, Brother!’ Dunya said commiseratingly. ’You’ve gone as grey as a wolf" (4, 91).

p In her thoughts Aksinya tried to ignore his new, “wolf-like" appearance. She somehow saw him not as he was, but as he had been as a young man.

p “My dear, Grisha darling, the grey hairs you’ve got!" (4, 676). Her words sound like a lament for the irretrievable past.

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p The last glimpse we have of Grigory is through the eyes of his little son Mishatka.

p “Mishatka glanced at him in terror and dropped his eyes. He guessed that this bearded and terrible-looking man was his father....” (4, 690).

p This is a spot-on definition of what Grigory Melekhov has become. “Bearded and terrible-looking" is all that remains to be said of this once handsome and strong man.

Thus Sholokhov depicts through portraiture the end Grigory Melekhov’s break with the people brought him to.

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p Sholokhov needed to be a good psycho-analyst to portray a character with such a complex, contradictory nature as Grigory Melekhov. We have mentioned a few of the methods Sholokhov uses in the character-drawing in And Quiet Flows the Don, how he creates the social and historical environment in which Grigory was born and bred and its influence on the hero, how he shows Grigory’s relationship to his family, nature, work and women, and the characteristics and qualities he reveals in the process. These are all different aspects of one and the same thing, depending on the writer’s ability to penetrate man’s inner world and correctly reveal the motives of his actions.

p The writer has a complicated and very precise instrument at his disposal if only he knows how to handle it, and that is psychological analysis. Every writer has his own highly individual way of using it, depending on his own particular talents, the aim he is pursuing and also his choice of subject-matter. But be that as it may, the fact remains that this instrument is absolutely essential to the writer who is trying to create a character of depth and which rings true.

p No character is complete unless the influence social and human relations have on him is revealed, unless we can see the deep links between his feelings and actions, which tell us whether he is a fully integrated personality or spiritually alienated (such characters as Pechorin and Rudin come to mind), without an analysis of his passions, a gift for grasping the most distinctive traits of 86 his personality. Sholokhov, being a fine representative of socialist realism, draws from the arsenal of Russian and world literature this incomparable weapon of psychological analysis.

p Sholokhov was writing about the life of the people at a turning point in history, and the picture he gave could not be a true one unless it was complete, unless, that is, he made a complete analysis of the characters involved, drawing on all the artistic means at his disposal.

p A special feature of Sholokhov’s rare talent is the way he gives his powerful picture of two social worlds at war not only on the level of large-scale historical events but through a penetrating analysis of the equally dramatic inner struggle between old and new with man’s soul as the battlefield.

p By his deep analysis of Grigory Melekhov’s inner life, through the prism of a highly personal struggle between contradictory social feelings, Sholokhov reveals those concrete historical conditions which determine the movements of man’s soul. He is interested above all in the causes giving rise to a clash of thoughts and feelings, and the conditions for their socio-historical actualisation. This side of Sholokhov’s analysis arose as a result of the application of the historical method to aesthetic theory, which was developed by Gorky and was embodied in the theory of socialist realism.

p Both the course and the result of the struggle between contradictory social feelings have a wider social importance. The struggle arose under the impact of revolutionary storm, with the development of the conflict between two worlds. It is not a question of abstract spiritual conflicts, the victory of certain moral principles; Grigory Melekhov is searching for the social truth, and his search is made dramatic by the Civil War, when he is forced to act quickly and make snap decisions at every step. One mistake brings another in its wake and even the most seemingly insignificant step is often fatal and irreversible so that in the final analysis an action is justified not by personal moral criteria, but in the light of a higher truth asserted by the people in their revolutionary struggle. It is as if on the vast canvas of And Quiet Flows the Don history passes judgment on Grigory Melekhov, on his doubts and vacillations.

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p Thus Sholokhov’s psychological analysis has the aim of judging man. While Tolstoi judges man on the basis of ethical criteria, through the approval or condemnation discernible in the writer’s own tone, with Sholokhov poetic affirmation of the objective laws of historical development comes to the fore. The humanistic aim of the Revolution is the invisible judge whose sentences have the higher authority of objective justice.

p Sholokhov gives a penetrating all-round analysis and judgment of the life of Grigory Melekhov and all its vicissitudes. He gives a sufficiently complete picture of the history of the Don Cossacks during the Revolution and the struggles of the revolutionary people to enable one to distinguish where Grigory is to blame for his errors and where they are justified by history. The final ruthless sentence history metes out on Grigory is the terrible end he comes to.

p Yet the struggle between conflicting social feelings in Grigory, however important, is only one aspect of Sholokhov’s psychological analysis. There are numerous others in the novel. Aksinya and Natalya are revealed largely in terms of their all-consuming, passionate love; Ilyinichna, through her powerful maternal feelings, and so on. Grigory would be as a pale shadow compared to the strong, clear character we know, if we were shown only his social feelings.

p But the Grigory Melekhov we know is a real human being living a real life. He reveals the whole gamut of human emotions in all kinds of situations. The picture is complete. We see the struggle that rages in his soul between conflicting social sympathies and the joy and satisfaction he gets from work on the land, which makes him feel at peace with the world; we see his feelings for his “beloved, unforgettable" Aksinya, which neither time nor separation can alter, and his coldness towards Natalya and later his love for her, the mother of his children, this woman who gave up her whole life irrevocably, right to the end, to her one and only Grigory; we see his terrible grief at Natalya’s death, his fatherly devotion to the children, to those dear, tiny creatures he had given life to. As these scenes unfold we learn more and more about Grigory’s nature, and a clear-cut, dynamic character takes shape before our eyes which is remarkably true and 88 authentic. The great range of Sholokhov’s psychological analysis is one of the most attractive features of his talent.

p Sholokhov is a writer of passion. His vivid characters have an unquenchable thirst for life. Sholokhov clothes such eternal strong emotions as love, misery, joy and suffering in flesh-and-blood characters, in a highly distinctive, unique manner.

p The story of Grigory and Aksinya’s tragic love runs through the whole novel. Sholokhov describes the strength of their feelings for one another, and the development of their love with all its ups and downs, in a manner that is at once amazingly accurate psychologically and by no means detached.

p Aksinya is ready to make any sacrifice for the sake of her all-consuming passion. A married woman, she fearlessly flouts the moral code and customs of the village. But Grigory, still a carefree youth, is not prepared to overcome the obstacles, and breaks with her. Grigory doesn’t forget Aksinya however, and continues to feel an irresistible attraction towards her, and his love which at first had been a mixture of brute desire and tenderness, gradually becomes more and more spiritualised. When he is away fighting during the First World War and the Civil War he often looks back on their life together at Yagodnoye as the happiest period of his life. Whenever he thought of Aksinya, he would remember his childhood and vice versa, and this subtle observation of Sholokhov’s speaks of the feelings which bind Grigory and Aksinya far better than a lot of words could. Aksinya is a part of him for ever, just as much as his childhood is.

p Grigory’s recollections are an important element in the character-drawing. They always appear in sharp contrast to the vicissitudes of his life, and are like a ray of bright sunlight piercing the gloom of his errors. He always remembers his childhood and Aksinya in specially hard moments, in direct proportion to his sufferings. After his conversation with Ivan Alexeyevich Kotlyarov, Grigory was seized by a feeling of “deep, never silenced exasperation" as it became clear to him that “he stood at the parting of the ways, struggling between two elements and rejecting them both" (3, 213). He was thinking of this while carrying a sledge-load of munitions bound for the front. As the bullocks plodded along the road, he lay 89 huddled against the ammunition cases and, burying his face in the hay, which “smelled of dry clover and the sweet haze of July days”, dropped off to sleep. In his sleep he dreamed that he and Aksinya were walking together “through high-standing corn”. Aksinya was as she had been five years before, and he saw her “more vividly than ever before”. A sudden jolt awoke him. They had met a line of sledges carrying corpses of people that had died of typhus. Grigory turned away from bitter reality and returned to his dreams of the half-forgotten past. Again, during the uprising, when Grigory, tortured by the thought that he had chosen the wrong path, sought oblivion in drunken carousals and chance amorous adventures, he would suddenly remember Aksinya as the love he would never forget and “childhood floated through his memory like a sunny day".

p Five long years had passed, and Aksinya was once more living with her husband who had returned from POW camp, when she and Grigory met again. It seemed that time and people had separated them forever. They had both aged and events had left their mark. Grigory, now commander of an insurgent division, was coming to the painful conclusion that he had made a serious and possibly fatal mistake in taking part in the struggle against the Soviet government. The day he was due to return to the front he led his horse down to the Don to drink. Aksinya was drawing water and deliberately dallied when she saw him. Sholokhov describes their swiftly alternating feelings with remarkable subtlety, showing real understanding of the “dialectics of the soul".

p As Grigory approached Aksinya, who was deliberately filling her pails slowly, “sad jnemories passed before him in silvery flight”. Aksinya turned as she heard his footsteps, and an assumed expression of surprise appeared on her face, “but her joy at the meeting and her old pain gave her away”. “A miserable, distracted smile" appeared on her face, a recognition of her inability to master her agitation and hide her true feelings. “Grigory’s heart was shaken with pity and love.”

p He said “Good morning" and, after a slight pause, “Aksinya dear”. After the common everyday greeting the “Aksinya dear" sounds as a burst of irrepressible feeling, expressing love that has survived the years and 90 suffering at their long, painful separation. This one phrase gives the psychological key to the whole of the bitter conversation that follows.

p “’Good morning, Aksinya dear.’

p “’Good morning.’

p “Aksinya’s voice was a strange mixture of surprise, affection and bitterness.

p “’It’s a long time since we last spoke to each other.’

p “’Yes, it’s a long time.’

p “’I’d even forgotten the sound of your voice....’

p “’You forget quickly.’

p “’Was it so quickly?’"

p A painful silence followed which seemed to separate them again for a short while. The author expresses this in the “hint of vexation and bitterness" Grigory’s voice betrays when he asks: “Well, haven’t we anything to talk about? Why are you silent?" Aksinya, who has regained her self-command, replies coldly: “It seems we’ve said all we had to say....” (3, 420, 421).

p Only an artist with a deep understanding of human psychology can capture the way the heart beats with such precision, and depict the kaleidoscope of the feelings.

p The two of them face one another, Grigory worn out by his trials and worries, the proud Aksinya, older now but still beautiful, and he suddenly begins to tell her of his love, with almost naive frankness: “But I just can’t tear you out of my heart, Aksinya. Here I’ve got children growing up, and I’m myself half grey, and how many years lie like an abyss between us! But I still think of you. In my sleep I see you and I love you still. And sometimes as I’m thinking of you I begin to recall how we lived at Listnitsky’s. How we loved each other...! Sometimes as I look back on my life it seems like an empty pocket turned inside out....” (3, 421).

p Grigory’s words have a note of sad resignation about them, he seems to have no hope of regaining Aksinya’s love and makes no effort to do so. Life has sapped his strength, he is no longer his former active self, able to give himself heart and soul to something that excites his feelings.

p “I too,” the words sprang to Aksinya’s lips, involuntarily expressing her love for him alone that had been 91 pent up inside her for so long. Recollecting herself immediately, she tried to give the impression that she had spoken quite casually. “But I must go ... we’re standing talking....” (3, 421). But Aksinya was incapable of guile, and with a sudden surge of passion, which lit her face with a youthful blush, she reminded him that it was there, by that very spot, that their love had begun, and a cheerful note crept into her voice.

But even when Aksinya was his again, and what he had longed for had come to pass, Grigory did not regain that peace and happiness and faith in life that had once been his. “Well, life has taken a new turn, but my heart is still cold and empty.... Even Aksinya can’t fill that emptiness now....” (3, 429). Such are his painful thoughts as he leaves home to return to his regiment and once more “squander away his and others’ lives" in battles against the Red Army. But he no longer dared ask even himself why, and for whom he was fighting. He was afraid to face up to the terrible truth.

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p Character is never a separate element in Sholokhov’s books. It is revealed as an integral part of a composite picture of life in all its complexity which, by showing social class sympathies and antipathies, family relationships, loves, hatreds, friendships and so on, brings out all the character’s traits and qualities.

p However far Grigory goes along the road of moral degradation, we always sense that he is somehow not quite a true representative of the whiteguard counterrevolutionary movement. Sholokhov makes this felt and indeed helps us understand why it is so in Grigory’s relationships with Uryupin and Mitka Korshunov. Grigory knew Uryupin from having served at the front with him. His acquaintance with Mitka Korshunov went back much further: they had been born the same year, gone to school and chased women together, and Grigory had married Mitka’s sister. Yet they never felt close, there was always a coldness in their relationship.

p However much the war may have degraded Grigory, he never sunk as low as to accept that degenerate denial 92 of the value of human life, that indifference lo man, which Uryupin preached, and indeed demonstrated to him on several occasions.

p Uryupin’s inhuman “philosophy” stripped of rhetoric and fine phrases expressed the true nature of the guiding principles behind the punitive war fought by all the White armies, which tried to pacify the people’s “mutiny” by shootings and hangings.

p Chernetsov, the organiser of counter-revolutionary officer detachments on the Don, and Listnitsky, a loyal Kornilovite, have a lot in common with Uryupin.

p The notebook Grigory took from the pocket of a dead Cossack, a student, contained the following reference to Chernetsov: “Before my eyes our Squadron Commander Chernetsov cut down a German hussar.... On the way back I saw Chernetsov’s face, intent andcontrolledly cheerful—he might have been sitting at the card table, instead of in the saddle, having just murdered a man. Squadron Commander Chernetsov will go far. A capable fellow!" (1, 428). Chernetsov fully demonstrated how “capable” he was in the Civil War, executing miners and ruthlessly massacring workers and revolutionary Cossacks.

p Many of those who took part in the White counterrevolutionary movement demonstrated this same propensity for senseless murder. Sholokhov shows that a delight in butchery often went hand in hand with fierce hatred for the working people.

p Uryupin was a fierce opponent of the Revolution. As a whiteguard, Listnitsky spoke with bitter anger of the “mutinous scum”, the “damned people”. Mitka Korshunov was also morally degenerate. In the Civil War he quickly worked his way up to the rank of officer of a punitive detachment.

p The author puts us on our guard against Korshunov from the very first moment the future butcher appears in the novel. His actions, the way he “playfully” lashes the sleeping Grigory with his whip, his seduction of Liza Mokhova and the “despair, anger and fear" with which he asks her father for her hand, his cruel, heartless taunting of Natalya, all dispose us badly towards him, as does that first description we have of his eyes: “His round, yellow eyes glistened impudently in their narrow 93 slits. Mitka’s pupils were long, like a cat’s, making his glance swift and elusive.”

p Throughout the novel the author makes a point of showing us that cruelty innate in Mitka’s nature from childhood, but which was to assume such monstrous proportions when he was serving in a punitive detachment.

p “Say what you like, gentlemen, there’s no one to beat Korshunov. He’s not a man, he’s a dragon!" his commander would exclaim admiringly.

p Korshunov is driven in his punitive “exploits” by a bitter hatred for the Soviet government, which has deprived him of his wealth, the biggest farm in Tatarsky village.

p Sholokhov shows the Chernetsovs, Uryupins and Korshunovs to be true outcasts, who, with their contempt for the people and denial of the most elementary human values, have really renounced the right to be considered human beings.

p On learning that Mitka Korshunov has brutally murdered the family of the Communist Koshevoi, Pantelei Prokofyevich refuses to let him into his yard. “I don’t want you to soil my house!" the old man says resolutely. “We Melekhovs have no kinship with executioners, know that!”

p Mitka replies furiously: “I know you! I see you through and through, I see the sort of spirit you breathe out! You didn’t retreat across the Donets, did you? You went over to the Reds, didn’t you? That’s just it! You all ought to be treated like the Koshevois, you sons of bitches!" (4, 149, 150).

p Of course only Mitka, blinded with rage and hatred, could seriously accuse Pantelei Prokofyevich of sympathy towards the Reds. The old man had his own firm ideas about Cossack honour, and Ilyinichna expresses them with wise simplicity to Natalya, approving her husband’s behaviour. “Mitka has turned out a real scoundrel. He’s found himself a fine job! Look at him! Not serving like other Cossacks in the real forces! Joining the punitives! And is that the Cossacks’ task to be executioners, to hang old women, and to cut down innocent children with their sabres?" (4, 150-151). Grigory Melekhov had been brought up on such ideas of Cossack honour, and he was never to be false to them.

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p Even fighting together on the side of the whiteguards was never to bring Grigory close to Mitka Korshunov and his likes, and indeed could not, for they were fundamentally different not only in their behaviour, but in their mental and emotional make-up.

In the Revolution Grigory had the opportunity of choosing a different path from the one he actually embarked on.

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p Grigory harboured an undying hatred for the tsarist autocracy, for generals and officers, gentleman parasites and idlers. These were the feelings of a man of the people, which had been awakened by the Great October Revolution.

p Grigory’s characteristic sense of dignity and self-respect developed during the years of the Revolution. This is revealed with particular force in the scene with General Fitshalaurov. The general’s bass voice thundered louder and louder as he tried to give a good dressing-down to Grigory, whom he saw as an upstart lieutenant from the ranks, and who had dared moreover not to carry out his orders. As the whiteguard general stood shouting at him pounding the table with his fist, Grigory could contain himself no longer and, rising, said in a thick voice: “I must ask you not to bawl at me!" Then, lowering his voice almost to a whisper, warned: “If you, Your Excellency, attempt to lay even your little finger on me, I shall sabre you on the spot!" (4, 130). The general looked at him in silence for a long time, then dropped heavily into his chair.

p Even if Grigory had ever had any respect for generals and officers, the war and the Revolution would have destroyed it for good. He soon came to have a very low opinion of the whiteguard generals and gentleman officers, who dreamed of regaining their lost estates, wealth and privileges.

p Grigory, a hard-working peasant, speaks with fury in his voice to a fellow peasant about the alien, hostile world of the parasite officers: “Look at their hands.... And look at mine, hard as a horse’s hoof! They can bow and scrape, but when I come into a room, I knock into 95 everything. They smell of toilet soap and all sorts of womanish creams and paints, but I smell of horse-piss and sweat. They’re all educated, but I hardly got through a church school. I’m foreign to them from iny head to my heels....” (4, 120).

p Grigory was sharply aware of the bottomless abyss which lay between him and the gentleman parasites. He was always feeling the haughty contempt of the foppish whiteguard officers for him, a poorly educated Cossack, and he could never forgive them for it. “They think we’re made of different dough, that an uneducated man, one of the ordinary folk, is some sort of cattle" (4, 121).

p The meteoric rise to fame in the Red Army of simple people who not so long before had been despised and slighted did not go unnoticed by Grigory. He spoke with frank admiration and with a touch of envy of Budyonny, a sergeant in pre-war days and now a famous Red Commander who had given “the generals of the staff a good hiding”, and of “some Moscow locksmith”, a Red regimental commander, who had smashed and put to flight the troops led by one of the most famous Cossack generals. All this brings Grigory to understand the main thing in the war. This is “the cause you’re fighting for”. He himself no longer believed in the cause he was fighting for.

p The Revolution had left an indelible impression on Grigory’s mind. Although it so happened that he often fought for the old order, he rejected it with all his mind and soul and was convinced there could be no return to it.

p Whenever he comes into contact with representatives of the whiteguard counter-revolutionary movement, they always arouse protest in him, and awaken in his soul that deep feeling for democracy which attracts him to the Bolshevik cause.

p Thanks to this positive side of his nature, he himself is quite aware that he would be more at home fighting for the Reds. “I may be a blockhead to you, but you wait a bit! Give me time, and I’ll go over to the Reds, and with them I shall be heavier than lead. And then you, well-mannered and educated parasites had better notf fall into my hands! I shall wring out your guts, and your souls with them!" (4, 127).

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p This was no playful threat spoken in jest. Grigory was to carry it out by fighting with the Red Army against Wrangel and the White Poles.

p In his psychological analysis of Grigory, Sholokhov uses what is known as self-analysis, that is letting the hero reveal himself by judging his feelings and actions in his own thoughts and words. All Grigory’s observations quoted above can be considered essentially as selfanalysis.

p Gorky makes extensive use of this method in his Life of Klim Samgin. The hero’s double-dealing and skilful dissimulation are revealed at those rare moments when he has the courage to be honest with himself. All that is false and trivial which has been carefully hidden comes to the surface, and we realise just how much has been kept from us. He admits his absolute lack of talent, his secret sympathies for the Black Hundreds, and his willingness to become an agent provocateur. To demask Samgin Gorky uses the method of self-analysis, and does so with consummate artistry.

p In And Quiet Flows the Don we have quite a different use of self-analysis. Grigory is a straightforward, extrovert person and does not reveal himself through shy, secret self-confessions but by speaking forth his feelings and sympathies loud and clear for all to hear. When he resorts to self-analysis it is for the purpose of examining not individual, personal things but his social feelings.

p Sholokhov employs the method of self-analysis in order to disclose his hero’s thoughts and feelings more and more frequently as events unfold, and these selfconfessions assume an ever greater importance. Grigory does his utmost to know himself and judge his actions. This is always true of him, but especially so after the Upper Don insurgents have joined forces with the White armies. He begins to ask himself who he is after all, for whom is he shedding his blood, what is he risking his life for, and on which side his true sympathies lie. Quite openly and with obvious pleasure he decides that his sympathies are not with the generals and officers he so despises, and his farmer sentiments begin to come to the fore when he frankly declares what he thinks of himself. He is automatically making a stand for things 97 directly opposed to the aims of his actions, to what he is lighting for.

p When the insurgents join up with Denikin’s whiteguard forces Grigory feels as if something has snapped inside him. This man of boundless courage, who not long before had spared neither his own life nor the lives of those entrusted to his command in battle, is no longer prepared to take risks, does not want to fight even. Grigory no longer has the conviction, however false and illusory, that he is defending Cossack interests in battle.

p Another important element in the character-drawing in the novel is the method of disclosing the hero’s inner world through inner monologues. This, along with selfanalysis, plays a large part in revealing the thoughts and feelings of Grigory Melekhov.

p Lev Tolstoi was one of the greatest masters of this method in Russian literature. Indeed he was largely responsible for creating this useful way of giving the reader free access to the innermost workings of a character’s mind. The inner monologue opens wide the doors for psychological analysis, making it possible for the writer to disclose the deepest, often contradictory movements of the human soul. Tolstoi’s innovations have had an important influence on the subsequent development of literature. Sholokhov, as many other Soviet writers, owes a great debt of gratitude to their masters in the art of psychological analysis, writers like Lev Tolstoi, Chekhov and Gorky.

p However individual Sholokhov’s great talent may be, And Quiet Flows the Don nonetheless does owe something to Tolstoi, both as regards sentence structure and the nature of the hero’s inner monologues. Although such passages may be few and far between, they are nonetheless important evidence of Sholokhov’s literary roots.

p There is a typical Tolstoian note, for example, in Ivan Alexeyevich Kotlyarov’s inner monologue as a prisoner of the White Cossacks. “He realised that he would get no further than Tatarsky, that here he would die; and he did not want his family to see his death" (3, 459).

p Sholokhov’s inner monologues vary from reflections of the hero expressing the movements of his soul through 98 a short talk with himself, to lengthy considerations of important aspects of historical development. When Grigory sets free a captured Red Army Cossack, we have an inner monologue which discloses the contradictory feelings he is beset by. “He ... stretched out his arms ... at a loss to know why he had gone out and given this order for the prisoner to be released.... He was a little irritated with himself for his sudden feeling of pity—what else but unthinking pity had forced its way into his mind and prompted him to release an enemy? Yet he was glad....” (3, 299). Grigory was tortured by “a rebellious feeling of the injustice of his cause".

p Sholokhov usually spotlights the culminating moments in Grigory’s spiritual development through an inner monologue. On his way home after serving in a Red Guard detachment, Grigory is thinking of his place in the Civil War on the Don. This is a turning-point introducing the first stage in his political vacillations, and it is expressed through an inner monologue: “He wanted to turn his back on the whole hate-riddled and incomprehensible world....” (2, 341). The same method is used again when, at the outbreak of the Veshenskaya uprising, Grigory’s angry feelings as a property owner come to the fore and his actions are henceforth dictated by the ideas of Cossack separatism. He thinks with a blind hatred of the Soviet government; and his searchings for social justice, for a truth under whose wing all might shelter, seem to him empty and aimless. “What had there been to think about? Why had his spirit tossed like a hunted wolf in search of a way of escape, of solving contradictions?" (3, 259).

p Sholokhov usually employs represented direct speech in these monologues, that is, the hero’s actual thoughts are given in the third person. As a rule, this is explained by the fact that these are thoughts going on in the innermost recesses of the character’s mind, of which he himself is not always quite aware. Hence the author’s frequent recourse to such expressions as “he was thinking disconnectedly and aimlessly”, “he vaguely considered”, introducing such passages. This use of the third person in the inner monologues makes the construction more simple and unconstrained syntactically and at the same time is a means for the author to subtly introduce his own 99 succinct judgments on the character’s innermost personal thoughts.

p At the outbreak of the Upper Don uprising Grigory is convinced that he has at last reached a final, irrevocable decision to fight Soviet power to the death for the rich Don earth, for the right to own it. With the subtle touch of a true master of style, Sholokhov makes use of impersonal direct speech here to convey the temporary nature of Grigory’s private-ownership instincts. The author’s suspicion that Grigory will once more be assailed by doubts and inner struggles is expressed in one of the first sentences in the passage, in the words “as if": “It was as if those days of search for the truth ... had never been.” The author’s opinion is voiced more strongly further on. There is a note of bitter irony in the repetition within such a short space of “now he believed" and “now he thought”. Grigory has changed—for the worse. But the insistence on “now” and the use of “thought”, “believed”, clearly indicate that these feelings were likely to be temporary.

p One of the original versions of this inner monologue ended with Grigory considering himself and the other Cossacks “the tsar’s landowners”.  [99•* 

p In the version published in the magazine Oktyabr (No. 2, 1932) Sholokhov dispensed with this remark as being incompatible with Grigory’s character. With his hatred of generals and officers, Grigory could hardly be expected to compare himself with the landowner parasites. In fact, most interesting changes were introduced throughout the monologue, whereby, using the more flexible device of impersonal direct speech, the author is better able to express his doubts that Grigory has reached a final, irrevocable decision, in a manner which does not jar as being incompatible with the future development of the character. In the original version Grigory’s doubts as to the existence of an all-embracing truth are given in an unreservedly positive form: “There had never been any such truth.”  [99•** 

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p The corrected version adds an all-important subtle shade of doubt as to the finality of Grigory’s decision: “Now he believed that there never had been any such truth.”

p There is also an emotional justification of Grigory’s thoughts in the final version which the original lacked. Before the uprising Grigory had hidden to save himself from arrest, and he knew that his father had been arrested. The original version read: “Each had his own truth, his own furrow—he thought.”  [100•*  In the later version this is expanded to: “Furious and embittered, he was thinking that each had his own truth, his own furrow.”

p The improvements Sholokhov introduced for the appearance of this section of the novel in Oktyabr are extremely significant and bear witness to his maturing talent. They not only represent a deeper and more flexible approach to Grigory’s state of mind, but show that Sholokhov was already taking into account the subsequent fortunes of his hero concentrating on Grigory’s contradictoriness and duality at this stage where he had apparently overcome his doubts once and for all.

p Grigory’s instinctive sympathies as a working man soon come to the fore in the ensuing conflict, and finally gain the upper hand. But his action against the Soviet government is most blameworthy, and it is difficult for him to erase his guilt and correct his mistakes. He is once more assailed by conflicting doubts and Sholokhov again resorts to an inner monologue at this vital moment in his hero’s spiritual development.

p “He vaguely considered that it was not his job to reconcile the Cossacks with the Bolsheviks; for that matter, he could not himself be reconciled with them. But he felt that he could not and would no longer defend all these people who were alien in spirit, who were hostile to him—all these Fitshalaurovs, who had a profound contempt for him, and whom he despised no less profoundly" (4, 141).

It was his hatred for the generals and officers that drove Grigory to leave the White Army.

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p Volume four is the book of reckonings. Every episode, every scene, every detail even, is significant. They are chosen and put together with a sense of artistic measure and consistency which admits no excess, nothing superfluous. The reader is kept in a state of constant suspense as Grigory’s ill-starred life draws to its conclusion.

p Part eight sees Grigory returning home after being demobbed from the Red Army. As he crosses the brown, faded autumnal steppe he recalls his childhood, and dreams of a life of peace and happiness with Aksinya.

p Our last meeting with Grigory was a long time ago. We lost sight of him in Novorossiisk when a Red mounted patrol rode round the corner and swept towards him and his companions who had also taken part in the Upper Don uprising. From the account of Prokhor Zykov we learned that Grigory had served in the Red Army, fighting against Wrangel and the White Poles. Much has happened at the village during his absence. His mother has not lived to see her youngest boy’s return; Dunya has married Koshevoi who is chairman of the village Soviet; Aksinya has returned to her home, after recovering from typhus.

p But what of Grigory? What is he like now? We see him as a new person, as one does after a long absence, when changes stand out particularly sharply, through the eyes of a chance acquaintance. Sholokhov’s idea of letting us see Grigory through the eyes of a chance companion, the widow who drives him home, is a master stroke. He could have chosen to show us the new Grigory through a meeting with his near and dear ones—Aksinya, Dunya or Prokhor Zykov—or by himself, giving an objective description. But, realising that these methods would not do—description by the author here would be too detached, while Aksinya or Dunya with their excitement and joy at the meeting would have given a distorted impression—he chooses to show us Grigory through the inquisitive, penetrating, experienced eyes of the widow.

p As the bullocks plod steadily along, dragging the creaking cart, the woman began to find life boring, and surreptitiously examined Grigory, his concentrated face, his half-closed eyes. “He’s not so very old, though he is 102 grey. And he’s a queer fellow somehow. Screwing up his eyes all the time. What’s he keep doing it for? You’d think ho was tired out, you’d think somebody had been using him as a cart-horse.... He looks as though he’d seen some trouble in his time. But he isn’t bad-looking’ really. Only a lot of grey hair, and his moustache is nearly grey too. But otherwise he’s not bad. What’s he thinking so much for?" (4, 498).

p It is almost as if the simple woman is speaking aloud to herself, one can even hear her tone of voice. The way Grigory keeps “screwing up his eyes" and looks tired out as if “somebody had been using him as a cart-horse" reminds us of the years of fighting he has behind him, “seven years in the saddle”. But more than that, this description of Grigory arouses pity and a vague feeling of anxiety for his future. Somehow we cannot believe that he is at last coming home to port, to a peaceful family life. And indeed life still did have many a sorrow in store for him....

p The great emotional power of this portrait of Grigory lies in the masterly way Sholokhov combines weariness of the war and all his past delusions with premonitions of the tragic finale.

p Rich, expressive imagery is characteristic of Sholokhov’s prose; every line, every phrase vibrates, is alive. Every comparison is absolutely authentic, clear and dynamic and is imbued with that strong feeling which plucks at all the reader’s heart-strings.

p The concluding chapters of the novel are permeated with a noble grief. In Fomin’s band, in the forest, Grigory’s ill-starred life works to a close, to a living death, while the reader, passionately involved in the hero’s fortunes, looks on with horror, and asks himself again and again: what is the ultimate cause of Grigory Melekhov’s tragedy, why did this strong, passionate, talented man come to this ignominious end?

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p When he returns to Tatarsky, after being wounded fighting the Whites, Grigory realises perfectly well that he ought to have stayed with the Red Army until the 103 end of the Civil War. As he himself explains, he did not return to the front because he was angered by the way the Commissar and the Communists in the squadron did not trust him: “Towards the end I couldn’t stand their distrust any longer.” There were obviously important reasons for their distrust of him, and in fact Grigory himself unconsciously expresses them. It was not just a question of his past service with the Whites. The fact is Grigory was not entirely reconciled to the Soviet government. After much painful trial and error he finally came to be neither for Reds nor Whites, but for what was in fact bandit anarchism. There was a strict consistency in his actions, which Sholokhov reveals with remarkable penetration into a life full of complications and contradictions in his description of Grigory’s inevitably tragic end.

p By continuing to struggle against Soviet power as a member of Fomin’s band, Grigory is sealing his doom. As well as breaking with the revolutionary people he is cutting himself off from the Cossack masses. It is Prokhor Zykov’s character that helps us understand the personal element responsible for Grigory’s downfall.

p He appears with Grigory about half way through the first volume, on the eve of the First World War, and pops up again and again throughout the novel thereafter, playing an especially large role in the last few parts.

p From the time of the uprising Prokhor faithfully follows Grigory wherever he goes. He is in fact a tragicomic counterpart to the hero, with almost identical fortunes. The simple Cossack expresses in a joking manner many of the problems which assail Grigory, and shows the tragi-comic aspect of the hero’s drama, without depriving it of its poignancy.

p When the insurgents join forces with the White Army, Grigory feels that something has snapped inside him and he no longer has any wish to fight. Prokhor feels very much the same way about it, but his sense of humour does not desert him. Speaking to the master of the house in which they were quartered, he declares: “The better the beast under you, the faster you can get away from the enemy. I’m not out to catch them; but if we find ourselves in a tight corner, then I’m the first to show my heels. That’s me. I’ve had my face to the bullets 104 for so many years now I’m fed up with it!" (4, 83). When the time comes to sew on his epaulets, Grigory sighs and says: “I wouldn’t mind if I never saw them again!" (4, 101) and his words express all his bitter hostility to the officer clique and the feeling that he is fighting for a cause that is alien to him as a Cossack farmer. Prokhor also has his say as to what he thinks of epaulets: “They’ve been waiting for us, damn them! Now we may wear them, but we’ll never wear them out. They’ll last out our time. I said to my wife: ’Don’t sew them on so they’ll never come off, you fool! Just tack them on so that the wind can’t blow them away, and that’ll be all right.’ You know the state of our affairs. If we get taken prisoner they’ll see at once that even though I’m not an officer, I’m a senior non-com" (4, 102).

p The combination of grim irony and humour in Prokhor’s speech lends it a special colour. This comic note in Prokhor’s worries, just like the tragi-comic touches in Pantelei Prokofyevich in the later parts of the book serve a definite purpose. The outcome of the Civil War was quite obvious, and attachment to the past, while still retaining the gravity of tragic trials and errors in the case of Grigory Melekhov, had nonetheless no further purpose in life. The sufferings of Prokhor Zykov and Pantelei Prokofyevich assume a tragi-comic character. They are laughing at themselves through their tears and sorrows. These defenders of the old order already appear absurd and amusing even to themselves, and this is Sholokhov’s masterly way of bringing the reader’s attention to the fact that the old was passing away forever.

p For Prokhor the war against the Soviet government has long ceased to have any justification whatsoever, and he cannot wait to see it over.

p “What do you think, Panteleyevich? Haven’t we poured out enough blood on the earth?" he asks Grigory after the insurgents have joined forces with the Whites.

p “’About enough.’

p “’But what do you think, will it be finished soon?’

p “’It’ll finish when they’ve smashed us.’

p “’Well, it’s a gay life we’ve run into, the devil be praised! Mebbe the sooner they smash us the better" (4, 107-108).

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p There is a certain guarded caution in Grigory’s “about enough”. He recognises his fault and secretly fears the reckoning, and is perfectly aware of the futility of continuing the struggle. Prokhor, on the other hand, takes a devil-may-care attitude and is not afraid to speak his mind. He uses every possible means to shirk the actual fighting, awaiting defeat as the only just outcome of the inglorious struggle with the revolutionary people. He continues to trail around with the Cossack counterrevolutionary armies out of sheer inertia. Actually, he has long since withdrawn from the conflict. In fact Prokhor, who tagged along with Grigory all the way to the sea, came to the conclusion that it was high time to finish this fratricidal strife long before his commander did. The beginnings of Grigory’s divorce from the Cossack masses, that was subsequently to bring him terrible solitude, can be traced back to the time they were approaching Novorossiisk. Prokhor Zykov and thousands of other Cossacks came through the hard school of experience to be finally reconciled to the Soviet government. Grigory, however, persisted in his error, and came to adopt a position of hopeless anarchistic denial of everything: “I don’t want to serve anybody any more. I’ve fought more than enough for my age, and I’m absolutely worn out. I’m fed up with everything? with the Revolution and with the counter-revolution" (4, 519).

p Grigory speaks of himself with bitterness and cruel scorn: “...Ever since 1917 I’ve been going round and round in a circle, reeling like a drunken man. I broke away from the Whites, but I didn’t join up with the Reds, and I float like dung in a hole in the ice....” (4, 532).

p Grigory’s lack of firm social convictions, his anarchistic nihilism, meant that a strong jolt could send him off in any direction. He joined Fomin’s band, but he joined it alone, Prokhor remaining in the village. When Prokhor asked him if he would be called to account for his service with the Whites, Koshevoi answered him rudely and abruptly: “You’re only a sheep,” and drawing a sharp distinction between Prokhor and Grigory, continued: “There’ll be no questioning of orderlies, but Grigory will have to face the music when he turns up" (4, 467).

p Grigory’s class prejudices as a property owner were stronger, his vacillations more marked, and his guilt 106 greater before the people and the Soviet government. His unquestionable talent, his abilities as a commander, his courage and military skill, as well as the faith the Cossacks had in him, had all combined to give him a position of authority in life. He drew others after him, and the more hundreds, even thousands that repeated his mistakes, the greater and more unredeemable his personal guilt was.

p “You started the rising.... The old debts have got to be paid off in full,” Mikhail Koshevoi says threateningly (4, 517, 520).

p Grigory avoided the reckoning only at the price of cutting himself off from the people once and for all. It was a terrible price to pay as he soon realised.

p On a road out in the steppe Grigory chances to meet a fellow villager from Tatarsky. “Will you be making your peace with the Soviet government soon?" the old man asks, and, in reply to Grigory’s evasive answer, continues: “It isn’t well, Grigory Panteleyevich; on my word it isn’t well!... As my old mind sees it, it’s time to end it!" (4, 602). An old woman he asks for a scythe also has no sympathy for him: “As he passed the old woman he distinctly heard her mutter: ’There’s no destroying you, damn you!’" (4, 664).

p These words are said of a man who not so long ago was being told: “You are our pride. How would we live but for you!" A great change had certainly taken place in the mood of the Cossacks. As he roams the steppe with Fomin’s band, Grigory is alienated from the Cossack masses. Sholokhov puts those words of censure into the mouths of old people, with the wisdom and experience of a life-time’s work. Coming from them it is particularly convincing, for they represent the wisdom of that part of the people who passed through all the trials of the Civil War, and only after many mistakes, often gradually and not without apprehensions, came to accept the new truth, and to recognise Soviet power as the only lawful government.

p Grigory’s moral bankruptcy stands out particularly clearly against the background of the picturesque Don countryside.

p Spring came and the snow melted on the fields, and the mighty Don overflowed its banks. Grigory would 107 gaze at the watery expanse, and at night would stand listening to cries of the innumerable flocks of northwardflying geese. One day he saw a largo flock of swans.

p “The morning glow was flickering brilliantly beyond the barrier of the forest. Reflecting its light, the water seemed rosy, and the great, majestic birds, with their heads turned to the sunrise, seemed rose-coloured also. Hearing a rustle on the bank, they flew up with a sonorous trumpet-call, and when they rose above the forest, Grigory was dazzled by the astonishing gleam of their snowy plumage" (4, 619).

p Here we have an example of that realistic symbolism typical of Sholokhov’s poetics. The beautiful, majestic birds, the dazzling gleam of their snowy plumage, suggest the purity of childhood, something fine and good that has been lost for ever. For Grigory is now an outlaw, racked by suffering and yearning. With him we see “the sun-hazed steppe, the guardian mounds showing azure along a distant ridge”, the “marvellously brilliant tulips" rising in the place of the fading steppe violets. Scene after scene passes before us, one more beautiful than another.

p This description of sunny spring bursting forth in a riot of colour is a powerful^ tragic contrast to the gloomy, empty Grigory, who is out a spectator looking on at the great feast of life. It is in these moving terms that Sholokhov shows how Grigory has cut himself off from nature, no longer understands or feels a part of the surrounding world, has become an outsider.

p As he gazed around him, he would be seized by a lacerating pain in his breast. Then he would lie down on the ground, which was warmed by the spring sun, and the pain would slowly pass.

p Grigory realised that he was an outcast, a mere brigand. “Nobody needs us; we’re hindering everybody from living and working in peace. A stop must be put to this, and about time too!" In a last burst of energy, a last attempt to put himself on the right track, he runs away from the band and, collecting Aksinya from the village, sets off for the Kuban. But Aksinya meets her death on the way. Grigory buried his Aksinya in a deep ravine at dawn. The scene is described in a masterly fashion. The short, jerky sentences with the frequent pauses convey a sense 108 of repressed emotion, as if a man is finding breathing difficult and has to stop and make an effort to control himself every so often. Grigory is quite crushed with grief. He had suffered and cast about desperately after Natalya’s death, but his sorrow then had been that of a man in pain, wounded but living. Aksinya’s death was a mortal blow to him, his heart and spirit were broken.

p The picture of a man broken by sorrow is given in very simple, short, sharp strokes, as a concise enumeration of outward details. Grigory tried to rise and, as if struck by some unknown force, “he fell flat; but he at once jumped to his feet in terror. He fell yet again, striking his bare head painfully on a stone.” Unable to rise, he knelt and automatically began to dig a grave with his sabre. He was seized by a choking feeling, and “to breathe more easily he tore open shirt at his neck”. When he had buried Aksinya, he took his farewell of her, “firmly believing that they would not be parted for long”. He remained on his knees beside the grave for a long time, “his head bowed, his body swaying a little. Now he had nothing to hurry for. Everything was finished" (4, 684-685).

p But the scene does not end ^on this note. Sholokhov adds a final moment of great pathos to reveal the great depth of Grigory’s suffering. The author himself introduces it with the words: “The sun rose above the ravine through the smoky haze of a burning wind from the east.” Deeply moved already, the reader is stirred still more by the gloomy severity of this image. Grigory raised his head and saw above him “the black sky and the blindingly glittering, black disk of the sun”. This is a man who has nothing left in life. Nothing could make up for his irreparable loss. One of his last links with the joyous, triumphant world of life has been broken. How better could Grigory’s boundless suffering over the loss of his Aksinya be conveyed than by this image of “the black sky" above him, and “the blindingly glittering, black disk of the sun"? Yet Sholokhov goes on to give the fullest possible picture of the broken Grigory. The powerful description of the spring fires in the steppe symbolises the epic grandeur of all that Grigory has been through. War had indeed ravaged his life like an all-consuming fire.

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p “In the early spring, when the snow vanishes and the grass which has been buried under it during the winter begins to dry, fires break out in the steppe. Flames driven by the wind fly along in streams, greedily consuming the dry foxtail grass, leaping over the lofty stalks of the thistle-grass, slipping across the brown heads of the mugwort, spreading out in the hollows. And afterwards the acrid, burning smell of charred and cracked earth hangs over the steppe. All around, the young grass grows a merry green, innumerable skylarks flutter in the azure heaven above, migrant geese feed on the nourishing herbage, and the bustards settle for the summer and build their nests. But wherever the steppe fires have passed, the dead, charred earth blackens ominously. No birds nest on it, no animals come, and only the wind, winged and swift, carried the dove-grey ash and the dark, pungent dust far over the steppe.

p “Like the steppe scorched with fires, Grigory’s life also turned black. He had been deprived of everything which was dear to his heart. Pitiless death had taken everything from him, had destroyed everything. Only the children were left. But he himself still clung convulsively to the earth, as though his broken life was indeed of some value to himself and others" (4, 685-686).

p A broken, morally bankrupt and utterly unhappy man is the tragic image of Grigory we carry away from the last few pages of the novel.

p Sholokhov’s novel shows with a tremendously convincing force that there is no third way in the Revolution, that fighting against his people leads a man to moral bankruptcy and dehumanisation.

p In a way, Grigory represents the last in a long line of characters from Russian literature who were crippled by bourgeois property relations.

Hatred for the world of private property, for class society and its crippling effect on man, and the affirmation of the new, truly human world of socialist society, runs through all Sholokhov’s writings like a leitmotif. It is present throughout And Quiet Flows the Don and is reaffirmed in Virgin Soil Upturned. Thus militant humanism is the most important single feature of Sholokhov’s art, and he is thereby following in the footsteps of the father of socialist realism, Maxim Gorky.

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p Grigory Melckhov’s tragic fate was not only the inevitable logical outcome of the socio-historical conflict, but was dictated by the authenticity of the character Sholokhov has created.

p A faithful representation of the historical process in a work of literature boils down to authenticity. The quality of authenticity in a work of literature is an aesthetic category, for it means the correspondence between what the writer has created with the aid of his imagination and objective reality.

p Obviously there can be no question of absolute correspondence, for the flow of life is not directly reproducible, but applied to a literary work with the aim of establishing the correspondence between the product of the artist’s imagination and the world of reality, authenticity is a most important criterion for judging realistic art and for gauging a writer’s understanding of the laws of history and what is of essential importance.

p At the same time authenticity is a hall-mark of true art, one of the most important conditions for the characters and action to ring true.

p Sholokhov endows Grigory Melekhov with many typical features, but in so doing makes him not an ordinary, run-of-the-mill character, but a vivid, strong individual. Grigory does not nurse his doubts and torments in the depths of his soul, waiting behind the scenes until the troubled times have past. He is a strong, active individual, who takes to horse, brandishing his sabre, throwing himself into the thick of the battle. His doubts and torments are nearly always revealed through his direct participation in events. First he fights against the whiteguard officer detachments of Ghernetsov for the establishment of Soviet power on the Don, then he incites the Cossacks to anti-popular revolt, leading them against the armies of the Revolution. Next we see him “atoning for his sins" by fighting with the Red Army against Wrangel and the White Poles, and after his return home he once more takes up arms against the Soviet order, joining Fomin’s outlaw band. Grigory’s flights from one side to the other, his tormenting doubts as to whether he has chosen the right path, clearly reveal the struggle 111 going on in his soul between his property instinct and the working man’s psychology. They were typical of the middle peasants as a whole but various factors contributed to aggravate them in his case and make it much more difficult for him to see his way.

p The path of the middle Cossacks in the Revolution was different from that of the middle peasants in general. The laws of revolutionary development naturally applied to them too, but the Cossacks had been a privileged military caste for centuries, and so they only came to accept Soviet rule after a long and fierce struggle.

p Yet Grigory was not exactly typical of the majority of middle farmer Cossacks, for, as we have said, a number of factors combined to make him something of an exception. His commanding role in the Upper Don uprising, for example, aggravated his guilt before the Soviet government and made his reconciliation with the people more difficult.

p Socially conditioned vacillation, typical of millions of non-proletarian toilers, when carried to extremes and not finally ending in joining the revolutionary people, inevitably led to an ignominious end. This was a general law of historical development, disclosed and made more understandable by all that was unique and individual in the fortunes of Grigory Melekhov. For Sholokhov the typical is that which correctly reflects the regular features of social development. This treatment of the phenomena of life reveals the progressive outlook of Sholokhov the writer and Communist.

p One of the most impressive features of Sholokhov’s talent is his remarkable ability for presenting the life of an age in all its complexity and diversity through a highly individual character, creating a literary figure as a phenomenon of the age.

p In Grigory Melekhov’s life, vacillations and searching for the social truth, Sholokhov embodies the chief conflicts of the time. In the armed struggle between the two camps in the Revolution and the Civil War the petty bourgeois was torn by conflicting feelings, his property instincts and the psychology of the toiler. In the period when the old world of private property and exploitation and the new world of socialism were locked in mortal combat, Grigory Melekhov stood at the crossroads. From 112 his personal experience in the Revolution and the Civil War he felt that the past was doomed, that it was hostile to him, but he could not understand the great justice of the new world that was being born out of the bloody conflict because he was confused by his property instincts and class prejudices. He nursed the delusion that there was a special, third way in the Revolution, a just Cossack order that would reconcile the property owner and the toiler, but it turned out that in battle he was serving those very generals and officers he so detested. He lost heart, decided to make peace with Soviet power and gladly joined the Red Army. But again he felt he was not at home. “Nothing is clear to me even now,” he declares sorrowfully when he returns to his native village after being demobbed from the Red Army.

p With the ardour of a truly great humanist writer Sholokhov convincingly demonstrates through the life of his hero that man’s only road, however many sufferings and labours he may encounter on the way, is that which leads to the new truth of the age.

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p Sholokhov’s works show that the most dramatic conflicts and the most tragic characters (such as Grigory Melekhov, Makar Nagulnov and Andrei Sokolov) are historically authentic and have the power to move us only if the writer’s standpoint is based on an understanding of what is desirable and inevitable for the people.

p The concept of the tragic, as an aesthetic category, is revealed not only in the writer’s attitude to reality but also in the depth of his understanding of what is taking place.

p A writer who judges events and his heroes’ lives from the standpoint of Communist ideals is able to penetrate the essence of the tragic. Sholokhov’s sympathy with his hero, Grigory Melekhov, does not mean that he justifies him. He was able to identify the historically inevitable with the desirable. One of the great merits of socialist realism was the fact that it refrained from idealising the innocent victims of history, all those suffering heroes of the novels of the twenties who were 113 unable to understand where true justice and truth lay. And Quiet Flows the Don, with its penetrating analysis of the causes and results of Grigory Melekhov’s tragedy, tin; tragedy of a man of the people who stood between two principles and rejected them both, and its author’s clearly expressed condemnation (in which his own judgment has the support of history), represents an important step forward in the development of socialist realism.

p Art and literature, while being the most subjective of human activities, by their very nature aspire to an objective apprehension of the world, representing man’s attempt to know himself and his fellow human beings as they really are.

p Nineteenth-century realism had as its conscious aim the important aesthetic task of truthfully reflecting reality.

p “Art is the reproduction of reality, the world repeated, as if created anew,” wrote Vissarion Belinsky in his article A Look at Russian Literature of 1847.

p A definition of this kind could only be born where the soil of realism had already been well tilled. It is full of pride in the magic ability of realist literature to recreate in a novel way before our very eyes the colourful flow of life in all its complexity.

p Naturally, a fundamental aesthetic criterion of this art was truth to life.

p It was inevitable that a question should arise which was to torture many generations of writers: How can the writer’s appreciation of reality be made most faithful and convincing?

p This question is of especially vital importance in our day, when decadent bourgeois tendencies are belittling and renouncing realism, when modernist groups are claiming their highly subjective and arbitrary concepts of reality to be truly innovatory.

p For many bourgeois writers the historical process appears as something terrifyingly unpredictable and unintelligible, and most of them try to escape reality by burrowing into the most intimate feelings of their heroes. This inability to grasp where justice lies often results—even in cases where the writer’s subjective approach is honest—in fortuitous and shaky ethical values, an absence of criteria of what is truly beautiful and so on. 114 These writers are somehow alienated from the historical process, and are not free to make judgments about it because of their limited ability to understand it.

p Without faith in the future there can be no art. It is as essential to a writer as the air he breathes. Lev Tolstoi once declared, striking a strong polemical note: “One mustn’t write only about what is in the world. If there is to be any truth in what you are describing, you must write not about what is, but about what ought to be....”

p These words of the great writer and apostle of truth of course by no means represent an appeal to retire from the contradictions and conflicts of real life. In insisting on the necessity for understanding “what ought to be" he was maintaining that true art is inseparable from a bright ideal. In other words, he is saying that the writer must believe in the future if he is to be able to understand the present.

p But in our dramatic age, humanistic faith, optimism alone, is not enough. The true strength of the writer’s ideals is not only revealed in the creative process but is put to the test in life itself. It is no longer sufficient for the artist to penetrate and understand the conflicts of the age, he must also apprehend the general laws of historical development, for only such apprehension, as the example of Gorky shows in particular, can enrich faith with the power of scientific foresight.

p Apprehension of the general laws of historical necessity is the “scientific rock-bed" that assures true creative freedom in our modern times, as is borne out by the development of socialist realism in Soviet and world literature. The writer can attain this knowledge as a “poet”, that is, as a man who knows the bitter, unsettled state of contemporary capitalist reality from personal observations, from direct apprehension of numerous facts and facets of life, or he can attain it as a thinker, from his grasp of the progressive theories of Marxism-Leninism. More often than not we find a complex amalgamation of the two.

p Alexei Tolstoi was for a while a White emigre, and then returned to revolutionary Russia. His long, hard road to understanding can be seen in the lives of the heroes of his trilogy Ordeal. He explains what enabled him 115 to achieve the great range of his art in an article entitled Marxism Has Enriched Art.

p “Only now that I am mastering the Marxist interpretation of history, now that the great teaching which was put to the test in the October Revolution gives me clearness of purpose and a method in reading the book of life, do I know real creative freedom, breadth of subjectmatter, a wealth of themes such as no one life can encompass.”

p In order to enter the realm of true creative freedom, a writer has to free himself from narrow egoistic views and sympathies, but more than that, he has also to understand the purpose and meaning of the great historical facts that confront him.

p In modern conditions he must find the strength to freely and fearlessly come out on the side of those who are building the road to the future for all mankind.

p The very concept of necessity or regularity is impossible unless the writer himself understands through his own experience his indissoluble link with the popular masses, with the lives of the simple people who as a result of heroic efforts have become the masters, directors and creators of life. Only then will the writer’s own sympathies and antipathies be ultimately determined by an understanding of what is good and what is bad for the people, and the deeper this understanding and the more it is imbued with the writer’s feeling, his own personal “concern”, the more authentic and convincing the picture he creates will be.

p This is why the question of the writer’s link with life is of paramount importance in the aesthetics of socialist realism. Every aspect of the life of the working people and their titanic efforts to transform the world is a constant source of creative energy and an emotional stimulus to the socialist realist writer.

p Thus socialist realism means above all art that is truly “popular” in the original sense, art that is directly and consciously defending the people’s interests, art inspired by an understanding of the ultimate end of the development of the present stage of world history.

p For the socialist realist writer a knowledge of the modern scene, a keen interest in people, their personal and social relationships, their standing in society and 116 every detail of present-day reality, however small, means a direct involvement in life. He not only stands up openly on the side of the forces of progress, but tries to aid their important historical advance by the very content of his art.

p Alexander Fadeyev endowed Levinson, the hero of his novel The Rout, with that “simple science it is so hard to acquire ... of seeing everything as it is, in order to change what is and approach what is being born and is to be”. These words are an accurate definition of the militant approach of the socialist realist writer to exploring life. This is the basis of that drive towards the future which is the great quality of Soviet literature.

p The writer who adopts this approach understands the historical process not merely as a natural result of the struggle between certain conflicting interests, but as something in which he is directly involved, and as his personal concern coincides with the aspirations of the masses, with the real content of the historical process, it is bound to lead to true objectivity. The principles of socialist realism give the writer more scope for artistic expression than any other creative method.

p It is hard to imagine a more difficult task than that which was Sholokhov’s declared aim in writing And Quiet Flows the Don. “I am describing the Whites’ struggle with the Reds and not the other way round. This is the big difficulty,” Sholokhov declared at a meeting with workers at Rostov-on-Don in 1930 (author’s italics).

p While previous works about the Civil War had told mainly of those who grew up and matured together with the Revolution and found themselves as individuals in the struggle for the people’s happiness, And Quiet Flows the Don tells of those who lost their way and suffered irreparable losses in the process.

p A considerable part of the Don Cossacks took part in the counter-revolutionary struggle, and many of the Cossack men and women in Sholokhov’s novel either took part in it or were sympathisers.

p Considering the events and characters Sholokhov chose to portray, and the great understanding and sympathy he evinced in doing so, it would have been easy for him to adopt the standpoint of his heroes as if sharing their historically justified illusions. It is easy to imagine, 117 for example, how the life of Grigory Melekhov could have been presented in a work by a gifted writer who professed realism but who did not have Sholokhov’s outlook, of a writer, that is, who judged his hero’s life “in itself”, purely as his “inner life" and not in relation to those fundamental changes which were taking place in the position and awareness of the people.

p The result’ might well have been a “luckless” Grigory, broken by the inevitable course of historical events, “a sacrifice on the altar of history”. Remember how Aksinya described to Grigory what she had said to Mishatka when he came to her crying because the village boys wouldn’t play with him. “He burst into tears, aiid such bitter tears too! The other boys won’t play with me, they say my daddy’s a bandit. Mummy, is it true he’s a bandit? What are bandits?’ I told him: ’Your daddy isn’t a bandit at all. He’s just—unlucky’" (4, 680). And remember the last conversation between Grigory and Mikhail Koshevoi. The “reckoning” was indeed hard.

p “’I’ve already told you, Grigory, and there’s no point in getting upset about it: you’re no better than they are; in fact, you’re worse, you’re more dangerous.’

p “‘How am I? What are you getting at?”

p “‘They’re rank-and-file Cossacks, but you started the rising.’

p “’I didn’t start it, I was only commander of a division.’

p “’Isn’t that enough?’

p “’Enough or not, that’s not the point.... If the Red Army men hadn’t planned to kill me that evening, I might not have taken any part in the rising.’

p “‘If you hadn’t been an officer no one would have touched you.’

p “’If 1 hadn’t been taken for the army I wouldn’t have been an officer.... That’s making a long story of it.’

p “’Both a long and rotten story.’

p “‘In any case it can’t be gone over again, now it’s past and done’" (4, 517).

p Grigory was wont to explain a lot of the things he had done as depending on circumstances beyond his control, each complicating the issue, and creating a vicious circle from which there was no escape.

p A writer who interpreted what took place merely from the point of view of Aksinya or Grigory, would be 118 revealing but a part of the truth of the life he was attempting to portray.

p Sholokhov adopted a broad approach, convinced that the whole truth could only be revealed against the background of history, and that history in our day means above all the development of the people’s revolutionary struggle. It was this approach alone that could enable him to treat the personal and social aspects of Grigory’s tragedy so objectively, and stress its historical implications.

p Many attempts have been made by critics both at home and abroad to define Sholokhov’s creative method. In the late twenties and early thirties critics of the RAPP group came out with some very primitive judgments, criticising Sholokhov on the grounds that in And Quiet Flows the Don he himself is basically adopting the position of the wavering middle farmer Cossacks and is hence unable to see on which side the truth lies, and attached to him the label of “objectivism”. Although such judgments smacked unmistakably of vulgar sociology, the word “objectivism” became firmly linked with Sholokhov, some criticising him for it, others praising him.

p In 1949 the German writer Willi Bredel wrote of Sholokhov: “He presents in a truly objective manner, in gentle, exciting and bright colours, people on both sides, their searchings, their mistakes, indecision and vacillation, their human grandeur and their human imperfection. He reveals the social and psychological origins of their views. He neither judges nor condemns but merely shows: such is life.”  [118•* 

p This interpretation of Sholokhov’s method combines different concepts. The attempt to understand true objectivity as an equally-balanced, impartial approach to the representatives of both camps can only mean that the artist is placing himself above the classes, on a height out of earshot of the shouts and din of battle. The writer is left to judge both sides, presenting them both in their “human grandeur" and “human imperfection”. This is all very well, but what is the measure of this grandeur and imperfection? What guarantee have we that the judgments made are impartial and just, that they do indeed reveal the essence of characters’ natures?

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p These questions are extremely important, not only in connection with the arguments that are raging around socialist realism. Their solution is of essential significance in any aesthetic system.

p Lenin’s remarks on the nature of a truly objective approach to the world provide an important clarification of this subject. Although Lenin was actually concerned with producing a definition of historical materialism, there is nonetheless much in common with literature in this point of departure, for literature is one of the forms of cognition of the world and man’s place in socialist reality.

p Lenin insisted that the materialist’s aim is to represent the historical process correctly and precisely. He explains how this can be achieved in The Economic Content of Narodism, where his remarkable analysis of the two approaches, that of the “materialist” and that of the “objectivist”, defines the essence of the truly objective approach to reality:

p “The objectivist speaks of the necessity of a given historical process; the materialist gives an exact picture of the given social-economic formation and of the antagonistic relations to which it gives rise. When demonstrating the necessity for a given series of facts, the objectivist always runs the risk of becoming an apologist for these facts; the materialist discloses the class contradictions and in so doing defines his standpoint. The objectivist speaks of ’insurmountable historical tendencies’; the materialist speaks of the class which ’directs’ the given economic system, giving rise to such and such forms of counteraction by other classes. Thus, on the one hand, the materialist is more consistent than the objectivist, and gives profounder and fuller effect to his objectivism. He does not limit himself to speaking of the necessity of a process, but ascertains exactly what social-economic formation gives the process its content, exactly what class determines this necessity.... On the other hand, materialism includes partisanship, so to speak, and enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in any assessment of events.”  [119•* 

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p These ideas of Lenin have a direct bearing on socialist realism. In art life, historical reality, does indeed appear in a variety of different individual fortunes and experiences. The realist writer contemplates the reality of his age and, if he wishes to be truly objective, to create characters which are authentic models of his contemporaries, he must seek the explanation for the actions of the masses, for people’s behaviour and feelings, not in the mystical will of providence, but in the conditions of the life of a particular society.

p Only art based on the materialist approach to the world can rise from accepting “a given series of facts" as inevitable to explaining them.

p The writer can only judge the historical process freely and develop his own standpoint when he is able to understand and explain the class contradictions inherent in the process.

p Lenin’s words define that ideological basis which is the essential prerequisite for the application of the historical method in artistic thought.

p Gorky repeatedly insisted that one of the important advantages of the socialist realist viewpoint is that it enables the writer to explain the past, understand the present and glance into the future. Indeed, the writer can only understand the present if he sees it as a link in the chain of historical development. The past reveals the true nature of the conflicts of the present, while only the artist who glances into the future can see the way to their settlement.

p Surely this is the explanation for the historical optimism of such works of Soviet literature as The Rout, And Quiet Flows the Don and so on, that treat essentially tragic subjects. Facts, characters and events are so grouped that the historical tendency is perfectly clear.

p However, a writer is not a dispassionate recorder of the inexorable course of history. Every line he writes reveals his understanding of events, his emotion, anger and love. The partisanship of the socialist realist writer is expressed not merely in his correct understanding of historical necessity, but in his open defence of the interests of the people and progressive Communist ideals.

p One of the chief features of Sholokhov’s method is the way he brings his heroes before the judgment of history, 121 so to speak. At the same time his heroes are not passive spectators or powerless “victims of history" such as have sometimes been sympathetically portrayed in Soviet literature. Characters like Grigory Melekhov and Mikhail Koshevoi throw themselves into the thick of the fray, partly in order to find the truth, but also because they know their strength and feel capable of having some influence on the course of history.

p “Over there people are settling their own and others’ fates, and here I am minding a lot of mares,” Mikhail Koshevoi thought bitterly, when he was living out in the virgin steppe with only the wind and the horses for company (3, 41).

p During the Veshenskaya uprising Grigory Melekhov’s hard experiences and bitter reflections lead him to understand the anti-popular nature of the struggle against Soviet power. “Life’s taken a false turn, and maybe I’m at fault in that too,” he says to Natalya (3, 392).

p The up-and-do nature of Sholokhov’s heroes is in itself an innovatory feature born of the Revolution. To the simple man, whose thoughts not so long before had revolved exclusively round his strip of land and the joys and sorrows of family life, the Revolution brought the awareness that he was settling “his own and others’ fates".

p Yet Grigory Melekhov and Mikhail Koshevoi often found themselves in a different camp, and their actions could not be judged on the basis of their own personal justifications. If the writer was to be truly objective, it was not enough for him to describe the flow of events in which, as Engels put it, men seek the motives of their actions; he must be fully aware of the forces which determined the outcome of the conflict, the direction of future historical development.

p Sholokhov shows us the very heart of life, its conflicts and contradictions, and its truth is revealed not through the author’s assessments but in the advance of history itself. The progressive trend of development, seen and correctly understood by Sholokhov, is the criterion by which all his heroes’ actions are judged.

p Sholokhov, whom the critics accused of objectivism, was possibly one of the most biased writers in the history of literature. Throughout Sholokhov’s writings the reader 122 is continually aware of the author’s attitude to the characters and events he is describing. Sholokhov makes no attempt to hide his ardent concern but the reader is never handed out ready-made judgments. These are to be sought in the images themselves, in their aesthetic content and in the culmination they attain.

The progressive outlook of this great Communist writer enables him to shed light on the deepest substrata of human life, to show all the complexity and inherent contradictions in the transition from one social order to another. By revealing life as it is, by showing countless people in conflict, Sholokhov teaches us to love some and despise others.