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p Makar Nagulnov, Secretary of the Gremyachy Party group, is a sharply-drawn character from early on in Book One. Since childhood he has had a fierce loathing for property, for the way it divides people and turns them into wild beasts. “I can breathe easier, dear comrade worker, now I’ve heard that we’re going to take all farming property into the collective farm. I have had a hatred of property since I was a lad. It is the root of all evil; our learned comrades, Marx and Engels, were right,” he tells Davidov (1, 44). Nagulnov rose in arms against property when he was a lad and, leaving his father who was a wellto-do Cossack, hired out as a labourer. In the Civil War he commanded a cavalry squadron and got shell-shocked at Kastornaya after which he suffered from periodic fits. Later he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, which still “warms his heart" (1, 45).

p But Makar Nagulnov’s passionate hatred for the old world of property relations is purely instinctive and takes the form of blind revolt. He quotes Marx and Engels frequently enough, but does not understand the actual way the class forces are drawn up at all, and in the complex class struggle during collectivisation is often unable to distinguish between middle peasants who have gone astray and real class enemies.

p Nagulnov’s selfless devotion to the revolutionary cause, to “his” Party which had been mother and father to him, his romantic preoccupation with the future and the way he feels the sufferings of all oppressed mankind as if they are his own go side by side with the na’ive conviction that “our middle peasants have got to be taught a threatened lesson”. “No, it’s no good talking to them, you’ve got to clout them over the head and tell them, ‘Don’t listen 281 to the kulak, you dirty swine! Don’t learn a love for property from him!’" (1, 148).

p There is a note of warning in the very first description we have of Makar: “He would have been handsome in a restrained masculine way but for the savagely arched nostrils of his smallish hawk-like nose and the dull film over his eyes" (1, 20, author’s italics). In many descriptions later on we find him likened to a bird of prey, as in the following: “Nagulnov had dug his nails into the table like a kite clawing its prey" (1, 78).

p These can hardly be chance details. References to his appearance and behaviour, to the lightening speed of his reactions and so on, are insights into his essential nature with his readiness to be cruel if he thinks the situation demands it.

p When, instigated by the kulaks the villagers begin to slaughter their cattle Makar is for having the more malicious of the cattle-slaughterers shot. His fanatical obsession makes him ready to go to the extremes of brutality. When Andrei Razmyotnov voices pity for the children of the kulaks he has been sent to dispossess Nagulnov cries fiercely, almost hysterically: “Is this how you serve the Revolution? Sorry for them? Why, I’d ... give me thousands of old men, children, women.... And tell me they’ve got be done away with.... For the sake of the Revolution__ I’d do it with a machine-gun ... every one of ’em!" (1, 79). One of his fits comes on, and he thrashes and writhes in agonising convulsions.

p He lacked those qualities which Davidov possessed in such abundance—consideration for others, the will and the desire to understand the needs of every single individual and help him wherever necessary.

p “You’re living in a dream, Makar!" Davidov says reprovingly.

p Nagulnov indeed lives as in a febrile dream, thronged with world catastrophes and upheavals, and he still seems to see the revolutionary fires, lighted in different parts of the world, during the Civil War. The villagers of Gremyachy Log interest him only in so far as they can delay or speed up the “world revolution" for which he is impatient.

p Nagulnov is least of all concerned with their presentday interests. If there is the slightest hitch in the vitally 282 important revolutionary task of collectivisation, he is ready to “get things moving" again by any form of coercion: threats, and if that doesn’t work then at gunpoint.

p It was as if he imagined himself to be some stern, incorruptible executor of historical necessity, which he anyway misunderstood.

p That is why there was often such a tragic rift between his aspirations and his actual deeds, between his lofty humanist aims and the means of achieving them.

p But Nagulnov sincerely believed that this was what was best for the common cause, and indeed for these people, if not today, then in the future. In this he differed radically from Davidov, a true Leninist Bolshevik, who considered it right that people should receive material benefits in the present too.

p Collectivisation was carried out in order that the villagers of Gremyachy Log should have an easier, better life. As Davidov put it: “Collectivisation is so young and terribly vital. Everyone must go along with us.”

p This was the root of the clashes that occurred between Davidov and Nagulnov and which were essentially a reflection of the struggle between two styles of leadership: one the true Leninist approach, which sought to patiently explain and convince, and the other an anti-Party approach, which sought to overcome difficulties by frontal attack using threats and coercion.

p Brought to task by his comrades, and time and again unable to defend his attitude in an argument, Nagulnov says challengingly to Davidov: “You’ve got into the habit of sucking up to those property-owners of yesterday, but I treat them as my partisan conscience dictates" (2, 191).

p Sholokhov has avoided making Nagulnov a tailor’s dummy on which to hang mistaken methods and erroneous policies. There are indeed unpleasant aspects to his nature, and far be it from Sholokhov to hide them. Indeed, true humanist writer that he is, he is quite merciless in exposing them. Yet there is even more about Makar that is admirable.

p Nagulnov is first and foremost a fighter prepared to sacrifice himself without hesitation for the cause should the need arise. Life has no sense for him without this “service” to the Party and the people. “I can’t live 283 without the Party!" he exclaims at a meeting of the District Committee bureau which has decided to expel him for distorting the Party line during collectivisation. “Makar ... spoke slowly, as if thinking to himself:

p “‘Where can I go without the Party? And what for? No, I won’t give up my Party card! I’ve put my whole life into ... my whole life...’ and suddenly he began to grope about the table in pitiful confusion, like an old man, muttering indistinctly. ’Then you’d better take me and ... tell the lads to ... I’d better be done away with. There’s nothing else.... I don’t need life now, expel me from that too.’"

p Out in the empty steppe, by an ancient burial mound, Makar broods on suicide.

p The decision to expel him from the Party wounded him deeply but it cannot kill him. The thought of his enemies rejoicing in his suicide is enough to decide him against it.

p As Nagulnov hastens back towards the village he has no idea of the violence that has broken out in his absence. Davidov is being beaten up by the infuriated women for refusing to hand over the keys to the barn, Razmyotnov has been arrested and locked up, and the Cossacks are intent on prizing open the barn doors to share out the seed grain.

p “With aching regret" Makar surveys the “black untended ploughland in its terrible nakedness”. And this love for the good earth which is in the blood of peasants is linked in Makar’s heart with hatred and fury against those who are hindering the building of the new life. “They won’t come out to sow because the idea of property is stamping and rearing up inside them. The bastards! I’ll go back and drive the whole lot of them out into the fields! Every man jack of them!"

p Once again we see the former Makar, lively, abrupt and ever ready to struggle against the idea of property and its power over men’s hearts.

p “He may be a bungler, but he’s one of us and no mistake,” Davidov thinks.

p When the collective-farm book-keeper, an elderly Cossack who had once been a regimental clerk, speaks scornfully of Nagulnov’s “lack of education”, Razmyotnov silences him with a very apt answer: “It’s the uneducated chaps that have to face the music these days.... 284 You’re mighty educated, you are, you make a fine row with those abacus beads and put all those squigglcs on your handwriting, but it wasn’t you they Ared at, it was Nagulnov.”

p Shoiokhov gives Nagulnov many tragi-comic traits. This mixture of tragic and comic elements enables the writer by using the peerless method of contrast to bring out all that is truly great in Nagulnov, to lay bare his turbulent hidden passions, and ridicule the “unearthly rubbish" he often spouted, his taste for asceticism and self-sacrifice, and so on. Thus laughter becomes one of the means of criticising his character.

p In Book Two Shoiokhov boldly brings together two characters that are poles apart and would seem to be totally incompatible: the gloomy and reserved Nagulnov and merry old Grandad Shchukar, the biggest fibber and boaster in the village.

p Nagulnov makes no secret of his contempt for Grandad Shchukar, calling him “a blatherer" and “an upstart”, and frequently cutting the old man short. For his part Grandad Shchukar jibes at the way Nagulnov rants on at meetings. “Last May Day, Makar, old chap, you talked about the World Revolution from midday till sunset. Boring it was, I must say—same old thing, all the time. Why, I curled up on the bench and had a nap in the middle of it....”

p Yet, in Book Two we find them sitting up nights together getting on with their “various advanced studies”. However it is their common admiration for the harmonious crowing of cocks that really brings them together.

p “Near midnight, in the unbroken stillness that reigned over the village, he and Grandad Shchukar listened solemnly to the first cocks and each in his own way rejoiced at their harmonious crowing.

p “’Like an archbishop’s choir!’ Shchukar whispered reverently, lisping with emotion.

p “’Like a cavalry regiment!’ Makar said, gazing dreamily at the soot-caked lamp chimney" (2, 59).

p Nagulnov’s unsuccessful attempts to learn English, Grandad Shchukar’s “reading” the thick Russian dictionary and picking up a staggering number of unfamiliar words there, and the delight both take in cock crowing are all “kinks”. The things that draw them together are worthless and ridiculous.

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p Nagulnov’s absurd friendliness for Shchukar reveals humorously his point of greatest vulnerability—his naive, head-in-the-clouds enthusiasm.

p Shchukar acts as a foil to Nagulnov, bringing out in sharper relief those traits of the latter’s character which would otherwise not be so clear and distinct.

p Yet besides humour there is also something rather sad and touching in this budding friendship between two basically very lonely men. The talkative old man with always a ready joke brightens up the cheerless life of Makar, still suffering and lonely after his wife has left him yet too proud and reserved to open his aching heart to anyone. At the same time Nagulnov, like Davidov, arouses kindly, paternal feelings in the childless old man.

p Nagulnov is a tragic figure above all in his relationship to the popular masses, in the contradiction between his bursts of high idealist enthusiasm and his actions, which are often cruel and rough. At the same time his personal life is full of violent, tragic clashes—his ascetic rejection of family life, his continual sarcastic allusions to his “former wife”, the gay, “loose” Lushka who was supposedly merely a burden to him, a revolutionary, and his secret, hopeless love for her.

p Nagulnov has no illusions about Lushka, as is clear from what he says to Davidov when he “sums her up”. “She didn’t give a rap for the collective farms, or the state farms, or Soviet power either! All she wanted was to fool around with the men and do as little work as possible, that was the whole extent of her non-Party programme.... Now, how could you or I keep a four-footed flirt like that? Were we to chuck up the revolution and all our everyday Soviet work just for her sake? And club up to buy an accordion? We’d be done for! Done for and degenerate as any bourgeois! No, let her go hang herself on the first branch she comes to, it’s not for me or you, Semyon, to betray our Party spirit for the sake of a worthless slut like her!" (2, 193-194).

p When it came to reasoning, Nagulnov was perfectly aware that Lushka was a slut, and the power of her grip on his heart was all the more frightening. He could not master his love, it was there to stay.

p For Shoiokhov violent passions are one of the measures 286 of a man’s greatness. Nagulnov’s secret unrequited love gives us a totally new angle on his character.

p Dynamism and laconicism—two of the outstanding features of modern prose—are eminently present in Virgin Soil Upturned, bearing an inimitable Sholokhov quality.

p While Sholokhov does sometime describe a character’s inner world directly, he shows a marked preference for i more subtle approach. Thus, in Book Two of Virgin Soil Upturned artistic methods which we might well sum up for the sake of convenience as “theatre” figure extensively: dialogue and action play an increasing role and gestures pack a far greater psychological significance, and there is a greater tendency to hint at characters’ feelings by overtones.

p A good example is the night Nagulnov and Razmyotnov come to arrest Lushka. The situation is a tense one. Nagulnov suspects Timofei the Torn, who has returned clandestinely from exile, of taking a pot at him, and has a feeling that Lushka has not forgotten her old “boy friend”. He knows that jealousy or hunger will drive Timofei to Lushka’s house if she does not turn up at the agreed rendezvous.

p We know nothing so far of Nagulnov’s true feelings for Lushka but the very atmosphere of the scene and the dramatic tension it packs prepare us for anything.

p The scene that follows is a psychological duel between the provocative Lushka, who is perfectly self-possessed, and Nagulnov, who behaves not at all as one would expect a man who feels nothing but contemptuous indifference for his ex-wife.

p “Lushka appeared barefoot, with a shawl over her naked shoulders. Her smooth brown calves showed up the pure white of her lace-trimmed underskirt.

p “‘Get dressed,’ Razmyotnov ordered. And shook his head reproachfully: ’You might have put on a skirt.... Lor’, you’re a shameless hussy!’

p “Lushka surveyed the visitors with an intent and inquiring glance, then gave them a dazzling smile:

p “‘But we’re all kith and kin here, why should I be shy?’" (2, 180).

p Lushka has wasted no time in starting her cruel game. “We’re all kith and kin here" is pretty sure bait. But 287 Nagulnov does not rise to it. He keeps quiet, as if leaving it to Razmyotnov to do everything that has to be done.

p Nagulnov’s outward calm is underlined: “Makar regarded her with heavy calm, and with the same heavy calm in his voice, replied”; “Makar said still as calmly, without losing his control”; “his cool restraint was such a surprise to Lushka that she lost her temper".

p For the reader, who knows Nagulnov’s usual rashness and hot temper, this “cool restraint" comes somewhat as a surprise. There is something alarmingly tense about it, and one cannot help wondering what might be the reason for it, and what secret pain and suffering it might be a cover for. Nagulnov even tries not to look at Lushka, as if afraid of some tumult in his heart that might suddenly burst its floodgates.

p While Razmyotnov admired the half-naked Lushka, “Makar stared at the old mistress of the house (Lushka’s aunt—author), with a heavy unblinking gaze”.

p Even when they remained alone, and Lushka was getting dressed, Makar avoided looking at her. “She threw off her night-dress and underskirt. Naked and radiant in her compact, youthful beauty, she walked unembarrassedly to the chest and opened it. Makar did not look at her, his indifferent gaze was fixed on the window" (2, 182).

p Lushka, who apparently guessed by some demonic intuition what Nagulnov really felt, hit out where it hurt most, with calculating spite shamelessly reminding him of her affair with Davidov. Thus, although perfectly aware what they had come for, she feigned innocence.

p “‘What can I do for you, my dear guests?’ Lushka asked, hitching up the shawl that kept slipping down with a movement of the shoulders. ’You aren’t looking for Davidov by any chance, are you?’" (2, 180).

p Again, a little later, she asks: “Why did you follow me? What did you want? I’m free as a bird, I can go where I like. And if my boy friend Davidov had been with me, he wouldn’t have thanked you for dogging our footsteps!" (2, 181).

p This is almost too much for Makar, who for a moment is practically thrown off balance and almost lets his pain and jealousy get the upper hand. “The muscles under Makar’s pale cheeks bunched sharply, but with a tremendous effort of will he controlled himself and said nothing. 288 His knuckles cracked audibly as he clenched his fists.”

p Here again Nagulnov’s feelings are not explicitly described, bul their exact nature is becoming clear to the reader. Only at Ihe end of the episode when he is returning from the village Soviet where Lushka and her aunt have been locked up, are we given a direct insight into his great suffering.

p “But it was not the former gallant and upright Makar Nagulnov who walked back through the deserted streets of Gremyachy Log in the blue darkness of early dawn. His shoulders drooped and he walked slowly, with hanging head, from time to time pressing his big broad hand to the left side of his chest" (2, 184).

p Not once throughout the whole scene is direct mention made of the sufferings tormenting Nagulnov’s soul. The real cause is subtly hinted at in such outward features as gestures, glances, tone of voice, the way he moves.

p Sholokhov never resorts to half-tones and lyrical understatements, and hidden passions always end up by bursting into the open, into actions. The most ordinary working people that figure as heroes always have strong feelings, which helps reveal their true greatness of character.

p One of the most important features of Sholokhov’s art is the way he reveals strong human characters to the full in all the powerful intensity of their passions. This forms a link between him and the great tragedians of the past.

p The proud, reserved and hot-tempered Nagulnov could only show his real greatness and superiority by containing himself, and not giving vent to his feelings.

p Nagulnov’s apparent numb calm and outer indifference in the scene with Lushka hide violent undercurrents of passion that are to burst forth in violent drama in the murder of Timofei the Torn and the final parting with Lushka.

p Both these scenes have the two essential features only truly great art combines: apparent inevitability and staggering unexpectedness.

p When Ippolit Shaly saw Lushka with Timofei the Torn one night outside the village, his first thought was for Davidov’s safety. It was only natural that Davidov should be the main target of the son of a kulak who had been exiled to Siberia, for he was after all the heart and 289 soul of the collective farm, and it was with his arrival that the expropriation and eviction of the kulaks had begun. However, Timofei fired his first bullet at Nagulnov. The two men had old scores to settle. Nagulnov accepted the challenge.

p At daybreak, near Lushka’s yard a shot rang out. “Dropping his rifle and crumpling at the knees, Timofei slowly, or so it seemed to Makar, fell backwards.... Even in death he was handsome, this women’s darling. A dark lock of hair had fallen on the clear white forehead that the sun had never touched, the full face had not yet lost its faint rosiness, the curling upper lip with its soft black moustache was raised a little, exposing moist teeth, and a faint shadow of a surprised smile lingered in the blooming lips that only a few days ago had kissed Lushka so avidly. Seem to have been eating well, lad! Makar thought.

p “As he calmly surveyed the body of the dead man, Makar felt neither his recent anger, nor satisfaction, only a crushing weariness. Everything that had moved him through long weeks and years, everything that had once sent the warm blood rushing to his heart and made it contract with bitterness, jealousy and pain—all that had passed away withTimofei’s death, never to return...” (2,185-186).

p “Before he turned away, Makar glanced at the dead man for the last time, and only then did he notice that the embroidered shirt he wore had been freshly washed, and the khaki breeches darned neatly at the knees, evidently by a woman’s hand. So she did you proud, Makar thought bitterly, lifting his leg heavily, very heavily, over the stile" (2, 187).

p It was not merely jealousy that possessed Nagulnov as he pressed down on the trigger of his revolver. After all, it had never occurred to him to hold anything against Davidov; he rather pitied him for having been a victim of Lushka’s charms.

p Timofei the Torn was for him a kulak escaped from exile, a bandit who had taken up arms against Soviet power. Nagulnov fired his shot first and foremost at a class enemy, and only secondarily at a man who had ruined his life. Timofei, the best accordionist in the village and a “women’s darling”, was a man who enjoyed a soft life. Lushka with her pleasure-seeking, parasitic outlook had found a “kindred spirit”. They had no scruples about quite 290 thoughtlessly trampling another man’s life in the mud.

p These lovers of an easy life laughed at him, making this ascetic, selfless man seethe with silent fury.

p Nagulnov fired his shot at the wolf-like features of the property-owning kind, with their calculating egoism and callousness. He saw Lushka’s liaison with a bandit and son of a kulak as a direct challenge to himself as secretary of the local Party group and to his “Party spirit" that caused him to place the common good above everything.

p There is a note of melancholy throughout this scene, sadness at a wrecked human life and the imperfection of human relations.

p We have only to compare the harmonious beauty, the wondrous light that radiated from Varya and Davidov’s budding love and friendship, that pure, “ideal” quality it contained, with the gloomy, tragic discord between Lushka and Nagulnov to feel the true depth of Sholokhov’s insight into the human heart and mind, the high moral demands he made on man.

p There is a sharp dissonance between Lushka’s physical beauty and ugly nature. And here is a man with many fine and noble qualities hopelessly loving such a woman.

p Sholokhov finds one last, “final” detail which reveals the smouldering strength of Nagulnov’s love. After killing Timofei he frees Lushka, thus saving her from certain conviction. He says good-bye to her, knowing they will never meet again. “Makar fumbled awkwardly in his pockets. Then he held out a crumpled lace handkerchief that was now grey with dirt.

p “‘It’s yours. You left it behind when you went away.... Take it, I don’t need it now’" (2, 188).

p In the Cossack villages a gift of a handkerchief or a tobacco pouch from a girl is traditionally the first token of love.

p To have kept the lace handkerchief left behind by Lushka testified to the youthful strength and purity of his love. Had he kept it nursing the faint hope that she would one day return?

p Surely it would be impossible to describe faithful, unrequited true love in a simpler, more down to earth manner, yet with such lyrical evocativeness.

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p Makar was not humiliating himself at this last moment of parting. “They parted in silence, never to see one another again. As he walked down the steps of the porch, Makar nodded a careless farewell. Lushka watched him go, then bowed her proud head. Perhaps at this last meeting she saw someone different in that stern and rather lonely man. Who knows?”

The author’s question is at the same time a criticism of Lushka’s blindness and narrow-mindedness and a statement of the beauty and nobility of Nagulnov’s restless soul.