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p During the war Sholokhov joined the armed forces like the majority of Soviet writers, working as war correspondent for Pravda both during the bitter days of retreat and the bright hours of victory. In 1945 he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, First Class, for his literary services to the war effort.

p Sholokhov’s articles “On the Don”, “In the South”, “The Cossacks”, and so on, were published in the press and in separate book form in the very first months of the war.

p His short story The Science oj Hatred (1942) enjoyed wide popularity during the war years.

p All the Soviet literature of the period has as its leitmotif the moral and political superiority of the Soviet people over the fascist invaders.

p The author’s publicistic fervour is very much in evidence in The Science of Hatred, but as usual Sholokhov the publicist clothes his political ideas in the flesh of concrete artistic images.

p The story is told in the first person by Gerasimov, a lieutenant. This factory mechanic from the Urals did not quite realise the enormity of the danger that threatened the country or the true nature of the enemy. Gerasimov was fond of reading and was familiar with German classics. In the course of work he had often seen and operated German lathes and machinery and was used to thinking of the German people with respect. Sholokhov’s character is an ordinary Soviet worker and Communist with a broad technical and cultural education, taciturn, reserved and kind. Even when he came up against the fascists in the first battles Gerasimov saw them merely as deluded working people.

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p Sholokhov draws a sharp contrast between the humaneness of the Soviet soldiers and the brutality of the fascist invaders. When Gerasimov is wounded and taken prisoner he has to suffer the most monstrous humiliations, and see his own comrades perish before his very eyes. By a miracle he manages to survive and escape.

p Gerasimov is not broken by the terrible trials he underwent while a prisoner. His implacable hatred for the enemy is combined with boundless love for his country and a fine awareness of the high aims of the Soviet people’s struggle.

p Now and then this love for his country, people, and the Party wells forth in the narration of this reserved, stern man, who has gone grey before his time. It shows through when he speaks of his family, of his parting with his near and dear ones, his last conversation with the secretary of the district Party Committee, and in the moving account of how he managed to keep his Party card safe in prison camp.

p Sholokhov’s studied symbolism serves to produce the desired effect of making Gerasimov’s tale a generalisation representative of the mood and feelings of the whole people. A landscape description precedes and prepares the ground for Gerasimov’s account of his trials and sufferings. A mighty oak-tree survives on a battlefield.

p “In the early spring a German shell hit the trunk of an old oak-tree growing on the bank of small, nameless stream. Half the tree had been shot clean away leaving an even, yawning hole, but the other half bent towards the water by the explosion miraculously came to life in the springtime and was covered with fresh green leaves. And probably to this very day the lower branches of the mutilated oak-tree bathe in the flowing water, while the higher ones still stretch out their leaves greedily towards the sun.”

p The author’s first words “In wartime trees, like people, each have their own destiny" prepare us for the rather remote parallel between the epic grandeur of the image of the oak-tree scorched by the fire of battle yet still full of life and vigour, and the trials lieutenant Gerasimov suffered. At the end of the story this parallel is reechoed, this time as a direct comparison: “...This thirtytwo-year-old lieutenant, reeling under the terrible 337 hardships he had suffered, but still as tough and strong as an oak-tree....” This comparison both enables us to grasp one of the main features of the hero’s character and appreciate the fundamental qualities of the Soviet people at war—their tremendous vital strength and staunchness.

p In 1943 and 1944 the first instalments of a new novel by Sholokhov began to appear in Pravda and Krasnaya Zvezda. It was entitled They Fought for Their Fatherland.

p In an attempt to capture the essential features of the Great Patriotic War Sholokhov focussed most of his attention on the ordinary Soviet working men defending their socialist country in fierce, bloody battles. By choosing the rank-and-file soldiers of the Soviet Army as the heroes of his novel, Sholokhov was showing the significance of the valorous feats accomplished by the masses in the Great Patriotic War.

p Maxim Gorky held that in war the rank-and-file representative of the popular masses should be portrayed in literature as the force deciding the outcome of the conflict. This focus on the ordinary people who are the makers of history is natural to socialist realism.

p Sholokhov, who always portrayed the ordinary working people with especial warmth and penetration, now wrote of the rank-and-file soldiers of the Soviet Army as of a “single heroic unit".

p Throughout Sholokhov’s works we find a constant concern with the complicated, and often dramatic processes that produced the new moral make-up of Soviet man. In Sholokhov’s novels the life of an individual—whether it be Grigory Melekhov and Mikhail Koshevoi in And Quiet Flows the Don or Semyon Davidov and Kondrat Maidannikov in Virgin Soil Upturned—is always related to and conditioned by the historical destiny of the people as a whole. All this is likewise true of the chapters of the novel They Fought for Their Fatherland that have so far been published.

p It is significant that Sholokhov draws on new material in his works of the war and post-war years. While in Virgin Soil Upturned and And Quiet Flows the Don he was almost entirely concerned with the Don Cossacks, his new heroes were people like Lieutenant Gerasimov, a factory mechanic from the Urals (The Science of Hatred); 338 Lopakhin, a miner from the Donets Basin, and Zvyagintsev, a harvester operator from the Kuban (They Fought for Their Fatherland)’, Andrei Sokolov, a lorry-driver from Voronezh (The Fate of a Man).

p Moreover, one of the main heroes of They Fought for Their Fatherland—for just about the first time in all Sholokhov’s works—is an intellectual, the agronomist Nikolai Streltsov.

p All this testifies to a considerable broadening of Sholokhov’s observations of life, which was undoubtedly connected with the events of the war.

p The action of the published chapters of this book begins in the summer of 1942, when the Soviet Army was retreating to the Don. The battle scenes in the Don steppes are a sort of prelude to the tremendous battle on the Volga.

p The battle of Stalingrad was the great turning point of the Second World War. Sholokhov’s account of it makes the reader feel like an eye-witness. The very choice of time and place testifies to the epic range of Sholokhov’s plot.

p The Great Patriotic War fought by the Soviet people was of such enormous significance for the world as a whole, and was so full of heroism and tragedy, that fora long time to come it made one of the most important themes in art and literature.

p And literature which wished to be honest, truthful, and genuinely popular in the original sense of the word, had to try and explain that “inner potential" which enabled the Soviet peoples to stand up to the most cruel, crippling blows, and gradually gathering more and more strength, go on to free many of the enslaved countries of Europe on their march to the very heart of the Third Reich.

p Soviet writers were concerned above all with exploring the spiritual make-up and moral qualities of the common soldier who bore the main burden of the war.

p Sholokhov once said of They Fought for Their Fatherland: “I am interested in the lot of the ordinary people in the last war. Our soldiers fought like heroes in the days of the Great Patriotic War. The whole world knows of the Russian soldiers, their valour and their Suvorov qualities. But this war showed them in an entirely new light. That 339 is my aim: to show in a novel the new qualities of the Soviet soldier that so uplifted him in this war...."  [339•* 

p In his unfinished novel They Fought for Their Fatherland (the introductory chapter was first published in Leningradsky Almanakh in 1954 (No. 8), subsequent chapters appeared in Pravda in 1943, 1944 and 1949, and were later collected together in the magazine Moskva No. 1, 1959, and in Roman Gazeta No. 1, 1959), and also in his short-story The Fate of a Man (Pravda, December 31, 1956, and January 1, 1957), Sholokhov presented the war not only as a heroic feat of arms performed by the people, but as a tremendous test of all the moral qualities of Soviet man. Here an impressive portrayal of the people’s patriotism is combined with a movingly lyrical account of the fate of individuals in the general sea of troubles and trials affecting the whole country.

p In his writings about the war Sholokhov remains true to the democratic line of his work. The central figures are simple folk, those who fought the great war in the ranks, working people like Pyotr Lopakhin the miner, Ivan Zvyagintsev the harvester operator, Nikolai Streltsov the agronomist, and Andrei Sokolov the lorry-dri-

p The depth and fulness of life is a remarkable quality of Sholokhov’s novel, the soldiers speak about the fate of their country, they discuss the aims of the war, recall peacetime, their families, children, and sweethearts__ The tragic intensity of battle may be suddenly followed by comic scenes and episodes.

p The words addressed to Lopakhin by a nameless old woman from a Don village: “Everything concerns me, duck" are extremely important as a key to the main message of the novel, the theme of common responsibility, and the connection between the life of the individual and a life of the people as a whole.

p What Lopakhin says to his mate Kopitovsky just before they go into battle for the river crossing sounds like a direct challenge. With quite “unusual” seriousness he says: “I’ve just got to make a stand here, while the others get across. Did you see how much equipment was brought 340 up to the crossing in the night? That’s the point. I just can’t leave all that good stuff to the Germans, my conscience won’t let me.”

p One has only to compare the heroes of They Fought for Their Fatherland with the Cossacks and soldiers in the trenches and dug-outs during the First World War in And Quiet Flows the Don and remember their feelings and attitudes to realise the tremendous difference in their moral make-up, and understand the essence of those historical changes which so altered the character of the Russian people.

p Consideration of the radical changes that have taken place in the mentality and position of the people in Soviet times is the determinant factor influencing the structure of Sholokhov’s narrative.

p LopaWiin’s “conscience” was an overtly publicistic statement of the Soviet people’s attitude to their state, of the feeling of a man who realised he was master in his own land.

p The novel abounds in monologues and “confessions”, meditations, dialogues, now winged and dramatic (Streltsov and Lopakhin, Nekrasov and Lopakhin, etc.), now in a lighter, humorous vein (Lopakhin and Zvyaginlsev, Lopakhin and Kopitovsky); and speeches like Sergeant Poprishchenko’s address to the soldiers at the grave of Lieutenant Goloshchokov, and Colonel Marchenko’s speech to the remains of the battered regiment, drawn up before him with their banner out.

p In all of them, in the most various situations we find this “conscience”, this patriotism and hatred for the enemy. A personal, frank note is combined with overt publicism.

p Sholokhov has a way making his heroes pass very smoothly from personal feelings to general reflections about the enemy and what the war was being fought for.

p Zvyagintsev picks an ear of corn which has survived at the edge of a field where the wheat has been burnt down. He is a farmer, a man who knows the value of every ear, every grain of corn. For Zvyagintsev corn is the source of the eternal renewal of life. In the springtime the shoot will push up through the soil, turn green, and Stretch towards the sun.... For him an ear of corn is like a living thing.

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p “Zvyagintsev sniffed the ear of corn, and whispered inaudibly: ’You beauty, you’ve got proper smoked, you have. You smell about as strong of smoke as a gypsy__ That’s what the Jerry’s done to you, the soulless bastard.”

p The burnt-out ripened corn across a vast expanse of steppe affects Zvyagintsev as a personal sorrow, arousing a bitter feeling of loss. In his sorrow and regret his thoughts automatically turn to the war, to the enemy who is so pitiless towards “everything living".

p “What a load of flaming parasites you Germans are, eh! Got into the habit of trampling other people’s land like you own the place, you swine. But what about when we come and bring the war into your country, eh? Then what? You’ve been lording it around here, lording it good and proper you have, wiping out civvies, women, and kids, and look at all this wheat you’ve burnt, and you don’t think nothing of destroying our villages.... But what about you then, when the war moves to your Jerry land?”

p Sergeant Poprishchenko addresses his men straight from the heart: “Comrade soldiers, my lads, men! We are burying our lieutenant, the last officer in our regiment”, and goes on to speak of Lieutenant Goloshchokov, about the family he left behind him in the Ukraine, and then, after a short pause, “said in a voice that had become different, wonderfully strong and full of great inner force:

p “‘Look what a mist there is all around, my lads! See il? Black sorrow just like that mist hangs over the people who have been left behind under the Germans there in the Ukraine and other places. Sorrow that won’t let people sleep at night, and sorrow that in the daytime they can’t see world around them through__ And we must always remember that: now that we’re burying our comrade, and later, when an accordion may be playing nearby us during a halt. And we’ll always remember! We went east, but our eyes looked westwards. Let’s keep on looking that way until we’ve struck down the last German on our soil.’"

p This type of passage where the hero’s personal feelings and “the general" are combined in a manner perfectly justified by the characters and the situation is an important feature of the hitherto published chapters of the novel.

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p Sholokhov does noi always achieve such an impressive unity of what seem to be emotionally heterogeneous elements. Occasionally, especially when Lopakhin is speaking, the publicistic overtone is too strong, and the “general” drowns out the personal so that artistically justified publicism becomes pure rhetoric.

p The new in Sholokhov’s heroes appears in numerous forms. It is present in Lopakhin’s publicistic speech and the deeply hidden thoughts and feelings of Nikolai Streltsov; it also peeps through in Ivan Zvyagintsev’s humorous, good-natured tales. The Cossack harvester operator from the Kuban speaks of machines with touching affection. He is as interested in news of the Machine and Tractor Station where he worked before the war as he is to get news of his family. In almost every letter home he asks his wife: “How are things at the MTS? Who of the mates is still there? What’s the new manager like?”

p The main idea underlying the novel—the invincibility of the new social principles that have penetrated the life of the people to the very roots—is expressed through the attention Sholokhov accords to the new qualities in people of the most varying nature and background. Faith in ultimate victory over the enemy shines through even in the most dramatic passages of the book, where the fiercest battles and most terrible losses are described.

p The narrative develops on two planes as it were: the “background” scenes of the soldiers’ everyday life, and the epic canvases of heroic battles.

p There is a sharp difference in the emotional and stylistic levels of the two planes: the high-flown-heroic and the humorous mundane. The scenes that show the everyday life of the soldiers are more often than not coloured with humour: Zvyagintsev will start to tell of the misfortunes that befell him in his family life, or Lopakhin will chirp in with his usual witty remarks, or the heroes will find themselves in some funny plight. It is these scenes from which we mainly learn about the characters’ lives in peacetime, and the ties of friendship that bound them in the war.

p The many battle scenes are imbued with frank admiration for the feats of arms of the ordinary Soviet people. Sholokhov tries to show mass courage as typical of the Soviet Army. Though mortally wounded lance corporal 343 Kochetygov summons up enough strength to throw a bottle of flaming petrol from his destroyed emplacement and burn up a German tank. Lopakhin puts a German aeroplane and several enemy tanks out of action. Zvyagintsev’s cool-headedness and tenacity are equally admirable. Captain Sumskov musters his last remaining strength to crawl after his men as they counter-attack, after the red regimental banner flying in the thick of battle. “Now and then the captain would lie on his left shoulder for a moment and then crawl on again. His face was chalky white like death, but he still went forward and raising his head shouted in a breaking voice, high-pitched like a child’s: ’Forward, my lads, give it to ’em!’"

p This passionate longing for victory that gives strength even to a dying man is a beautiful extraordinarily moving instance of heroism. People like Sumskov, Kochetygov, Lopakhin, Zvyagintsev and Streltsov can be killed but not defeated.

p Sholokhov adheres to the essential socialist realist concept of man as a fighter by nature, a victor over the forces of the dying world of imperialist aggression and oppression.

p Side by side with the heroic in the battle scenes we find humour too. This bold combination of dramatic and everyday moments, of high-flown passionate lyricism and humour, is very characteristic of Sholokhov’s works.

p It is not just that Sholokhov tries to give the reader a rest with episodes in a lighter vein after emotional tension and suspense, but this combination of apparently heterogeneous elements enables him to give a fuller picture of his heroes, ordinary people, with their moments of fear and doubt, yet at the same time capable of feats of valour. This ability to render the heroic by way of the ordinary mundane is also a feature of Alexander Tvardovsky’s great poem Vastly Tyorkin.

p Sholokhov’s novel deals not only with the soldiers and officers at the front. In a situation that was changing with catastrophic speed, places that until recently had lain in the peaceful rear became the frontline, and so people who had suddenly been plunged into all the horrors and hardships of war kept coming into the author’s field of vision—old folk, women.

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p By alternating civilian life and short lulls in the fighting with sudden fierce battles involving dozens of tanks, aircraft, mortars and heavy guns, Sholokhov gives a complete picture of the people at war.

p Both And Quiet Flows the Don and Virgin Soil Upturned depict the collective efforts of the people to transform life. The same is true of They Fought for Their Fatherland, where Sholokhov sets out to depict the heroic endeavour of the people in the war.

p The “peaceful” scenes are imbued with heroism just as the battle scenes are. Thus, the account of the battle for the height, where a handful of soldiers, without liaison, without artillery cover, or tanks, held up the nazis and even threw them back at bayonet point, where we have Captain Sumskov’s moving heroism, is preceded by a chapter about a “peaceful” respite....

p There is “the small irate-looking old woman in a worn blue skirt and a dirty blouse" whom Lopakhin asks for a bucket and some salt to cook the lobsters he is longing to taste. She starts off by giving him a severe dressing down for retreating, for leaving towns and villages at the mercy of the enemy. Her words are full of restrained grief, and injured pride.

p “I’ve three sons and a son-in-law at the front, and a fourth, my youngest was killed at Sevastopol town, see? You’re a stranger, that’s why I’m talking to you friendly like, but if my sons were to turn up here right now, why I wouldn’t let them into the yard. I’d give ’em a bash on the skull and tell ’ern a thing or two as their mother. ’You went off to fight, so fight like men, damn you,’ I’d say to ’em, ’and don’t drag the enemy after you right through the land, and shame your old mother publicly!’"

p This ability to show the beautiful and noble through the everyday is a characteristic feature of Sholokhov’s talent and humanism.

p The original “visual” impression changes noticeably, and is greatly enriched. “What their mother has to say" represents the hopes and fears, the thoughts and worries of millions of mothers.

p The figure of the old woman from the Don village has all the moving significance of a generalisation while losing nothing of its concreteness. She is like an incarnation of the proud and sorrowing Soldier’s Mother, of 345 Motherland speaking the bitter truth to fighting sons.

p Sholekhov again returns us to the particular circumstances of the moment, to what is now going on in the mind of the vexed and ashamed Lopakhin—“What the devil possessed me to come here!"—and to how the old woman brings him a bucket and some salt.

p But then the concrete, the particular once more slides into the general, universal. “...The little old woman, weary and bent with age and work, went past with such grave majesty that to Lopakhin it seemed that she was twice as tall as him and looked down on him with scorn and pity...’" (author’s italics).

p The nature of the images Sholokhov employs testifies to the way the apparently romantic “device” can be organically combined with the concrete and realistic in modern prose.

p In They Fought for Their Fatherland and The Fate of a Man Sholokhov’s realism is imbued with a publicistic acuteriess, symbolic imagery and sudden romantic generalisations without losing any of its tremendous clarity, genre detail or inspired psychological penetration.

p The discovery of new means of expression, which with Sholokhov is tied up with a constant attempt to single outstandingly heroic in the ordinary and mundane, and show it to be an essential element in the character of Soviet people widens the possibilities of realism endowing it with new traits as compared to nineteenth-century realism.

p The personal, lyrical note sounds much more strongly in Sholokhov’s post-war works. In The Fate of a Man the author “projects himself" into the narrative. His thoughts and feelings as the narrator strengthen the emotional intensity of the tale and help bring out the fortitude, strength and sheer greatness of the hero, Andrei Sokolov, an ordinary Russian man. This tale of irreparable losses and terrible grief is imbued with faith in life and the human race.

p The “cyclic” composition of the story (at the beginning the narrator meets Andrei Sokolov and his adopted son Vanya by the ferry over a river that has burst its banks in the spring flood, and at the end takes his leave of them there) rounds off in a closed circuit so to speak the story of Andrei Sokolov’s life.

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p The writer has set himself a very impressive task—that of telling the story of a human life in relation to the events of the Second World War, the tremendous test the people and the state were put to, and the tragedy of one of the individuals who went through all the terrible hardships of the war.

p Out of the boundless spring steppe a man appears “tall and rather stooped”, leading a little boy of five or six by the hand.

p And off they go again at the end, “Two orphans, two grains of sand swept into strange parts by the tremendous hurricane of the war...” (50).  [346•* 

p How could these two lives be told in the genre that we call a story? The fate of a man is more than a mere story. Indeed, the title itself, with the philosophical and aesthetic meaning it embodies, demanded an epic solution. And Sholokhov found an extraordinarily compressed, striking form, that combined epic with laconicism, remarkable single-mindedness with tremendous range. The Fate of a Man represents the discovery of a new form, which can conveniently be called the epic short story.

p There has been a tendency in literary criticism over the last few years to exaggerate the significance of socalled lyrical prose (see, for example, “Current Developments in the Novel" by M. Kuznetsov, Novy Mir No. 2, 1960). We often overlook the fact that the epic which developed in Soviet literature out of the “normal conditions" of the novel has in its turn an important influence on the present-day novel and on the short story, novelette and so forth, endowing them with a number of important new elements both in form and content.

p At first it seems as if Sholokhov is returning to the original short-story form that has been neglected of late, where the author listened to the account of a narrator who was a direct participant in or witness of events. A tale from life told by someone: only then could one speak of a short story. Hence the traditional beginning: where and in what circumstances the author heard the tale.

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p In as far as Sholokhov uses the traditional beginning, he is in a way renovating the old tradition. But here the similarity ends. The Fate of a Man is not a “personal story”, in the accepted sense of the term. Sholokhov selects from Andrei Sokolov’s life only those features which reveal the individual human life in the context of the tragic events of the age and form a sympathetic generalised portrayal of Man at War in broad historical perspective, showing the contrast between the humane hope-inspiring and peace-loving world of socialism and the cruel, barbarous world of fascism that has unleashed the war.

p Such is the complex socio-philosophical and concrete historical foundation on which Sholokhov’s story is built.

p There are two voices then in the story. Andrei Sokolov tells the story of his life, and is thus the main narrator, while 1he author is in the role of listener, a chance acquaintance who asks the odd question, says something now and again when it is impossible to remain silent before the stranger’s grief, or suddenly bursts out, unable to contain his emotion at the moving tale he is hearing....

p The author plays an active role as commentator in the story.

p “When I glanced at him sideways I felt strangely disturbed. Have you ever seen eyes that look as if they have been sprinkled with ash, eyes filled with such unabating pain and sadness that it is hard to look into them? This chance acquaintance of mine had eyes like that" (9).

p The sudden close-up we are given of these eyes penetrates so deeply into the man’s hidden suffering that it almost takes your breath away.

p They are seen by a man who is extremely sensitive to other people’s grief and needs. He sympathises with all his heart and soul and infects us with his noble and purifying compassion.

p Andrei Sokolov begins his frank confession. “His emotion communicated itself to me,” the author says simply. Full of sympathy for the other man’s sufferings, he says quietly, straight from the heart: “Don’t let it get you down, friend, don’t think of it" (15).

p The tale of irreparable losses continues, until, once again, Andrei Sokolov is too overcome to go on and 348 falls silent. “We lighted up....” The two men have been brought very close by the feeling of mutual understanding that has grown up between them.

p In that minute of involuntary silence, the author looks around him, and the sunny, early spring day seemssomehow to have changed.

p “The sun shone as hot as in May,” we are told at the beginning of the story. “It was so hot...” the author repeats a few lines later. He felt a tremendous peace and calm descend on him. “It was good to sit there alone, abandoning myself completely to the stillness and solitude" (7).

p Now, after being infected by the other man’s deep, inconsolable sorrow, everything seems to have become veiled in a grey shroud of gloom.

p “The warm breeze still rustled the dry leaves of the alders, the clouds were still floating past in the towering blue, as though under taut white sails, but in those minutes of solemn silence the boundless world preparing for the great fulfilment of spring, for that eternal affirmation of the living in life, seemed quite different to me.”

p The author’s words are not just a sympathetic commentary. They help us to understand a human life and not just see it, to understand it in the context of the time, and grasp its universal content and significance.

p The subdued reference to “the eternal affirmation of the living in life" returns us to one of the most vital and personal themes that constantly reoccurs throughout Sholokhov’s works. Here it sets the stage for Andrei Sokolov’s account of how he buried his “last joy and hope”, his son Anatoly, in foreign German soil; how he was left completely alone; how he came to meet Vanya. “At night, I can stroke him while he’s sleeping. I can smell his curls. It takes some of the pain out of my heart, makes it a bit softer. It had just about turned to stone, you know" (47).

p The reference to “the eternal affirmation of the living in life" is a prelude for the author’s reflections on the future of the stranger and his new son, which are the culminating point of the whole story, the philosophical resume of all that has gone before. The narrative passes from the melancholy key of tragic hopelessness to the jubilant key of heroic faith and optimism.

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p But the author is a human being, with a human heart, and a very human heart at that. The last chord is a short cry of pain from a heart wounded by another man’s grief.

p “I felt sad as I watched them go. Perhaps everything would have been all right at our parting but for Vanya. After he had gone a few paces, he twisted round on his stumpy legs and waved to me with his little rosy hand. And suddenly a soft but taloned paw seemed to grip my heart, and I turned hastily away. No, not only in their sleep do they weep, these elderly men whose hair grew grey in the years of war. They weep, too, in their waking hours. The thing is to be able to turn away in time. The important thing is not to wound a child’s heart, not to let him see that unwilling tear that burns the cheek of a man" (50).

p There was a third voice in Sholokhov’s story—the clear, pure voice of a child, apparently not fully aware of all the hardships and misfortunes that fall to a man’s lot.

p With his eyes as bright and clear as the sky, his pink cold hands and the touching way he presses trustfully against the knees of the author, a complete stranger, Vanya is like a vision of innocent childhood itself. “I’m not an old man, Uncle,” he replied to the author’s friendly appellation, with a surprised expression and the directness common at his age. “I’m only a boy, and I’m not chilly either. My hands are just cold because I’ve been making snowballs" (8).

p Having appeared at the beginning in such a brightly carefree key, in the final scenes he will be a direct participant in a great human tragedy.

p The theme of injured, wretched childhood has long been one of the most tragically intense, social themes in humanistic Russian literature. The very concept of humaneness, whether in connection with individual behaviour or society as a whole, has been vividly expressed in relation to childhood.

p The humanistic condemnation of war and fascism in The Fate of a Man is equally present in the story of Vanya and that of Andrei Sokolov.

p Andrei Sokolov speaks of the child with painfully restrained grief. “‘Such a little fellow and he’d already 350 learned to sigh. Was that the thing for him to be doing? ’Where’s your father, Vanya?’ I asked. ’He was killed at the front,’ he whispered. ’And Mummy?’ ’Mummy was killed by a bomb when we were in the train.’ ’Where were you coming from in the train?’ ’I don’t know, I don’t remember....’ ’And haven’t you got any family at all?’ ’No, nobody.’ ’But where do you sleep at night?’ ’ Anywhere I can find’" (44-45).

p This orphan’s sigh is a heavy weight on the scales of history, condemning those who began the war.

p Andrei Sokolov’s decision to adopt the child reveals to us the store of kindness in the man, his ineradicable humaneness. lie was returning the joy of childhood to the little boy, he would shield him from pain, suffering and grief. There was a heroic quality in this step, for here was a man who had lost all, whom the war had left depleted, yet even in his terrible, soul-destroying loneliness he had managed to remain a Human Being.

p It was in Andrei Sokolov’s attitude to Vanya that humanism won its greatest victory, triumphing over the inhumanity of fascism, over destruction and death itself.

p The life-asserting motif which comes in at the beginning of the story, in the description of “the eternally young, barely perceptible aroma of earth that has not long been liberated from the snow”, is taken up again a little later in the reference to “the eternal affirmation of the living in life”, and is rounded off in the dramatically heroic intonations of the finale, with its note of passionate humanity, warmed and lit by the child’s smile.

p As you read Sholokhov’s story it is as if before your very eyes there arises above the world a man in army boots, roughly patched khaki trousers, and a quilted jacket scorched in several places—like a living war memorial, an incarnation of sorrow, suffering and loneliness. Behind him is a long chain of bitter experiences—concentration camp, the death of his wife and children, his home in ruins, the loss of his comrades-inarms—

p “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, I just stare into the darkness and I think: ’What did you do it for, life? Why did you maim me like this? Why did you punish me?’ And I get no answer, either in darkness, or when 351 the sun’s shining bright.... No, I get no answer, and I’ll never get one!" (9).

p What a passionate condemnation of war we have in this cri du coeur at the beginning of the story.

p Nor is this merely a condemnation of what is over and done with. It sounds as a passionate appeal to the present too, to the whole world, to every single man and woman, to stop for a moment and reflect on what war brings, what it could still bring.

p Just before the end of the story the author comes in again, this time with a calm reflection, the reflection of a man who has seen a lot in his time: “I wanted to believe that this Russian, this man of unbreakable will, would stick it out, and that the boy would grow at his father’s side into a man who could endure anything, overcome any obstacle if his country called up on him to do so" (50).

p Here we have an affirmation of the greatness and beauty of true humanity, an apotheosis of courage and firmness, a glorification of the man who had stood up under the blows of war and borne the impossible.

p The two themes, the heroic and the tragic, the feat and the suffering, intermingle throughout the story, forming a polyphonic whole.

p Nothing is left to chance in the composition of the work. I would call it musical, symphonic even. The main leitmotifs and principal images stand out very clearly. The story falls naturally into very distinct parts, as regards subject-matter and also the emotional overtones. They are the introduction, the three stages of Andrei Sokolov’s story, and the final scene. This division is reinforced by the alternation of the voices of the herostory teller and the author—narrator.

p Sholokhov has found just the right “setting” for the story, with his usual, unfailing accuracy—juncture of winter and spring, when it is still cold but already warm, the first triumphant days of spring coming with “rare drive and swiftness”. The first spring after the war. The streams are bursting the ice and flooding madly. At the spot whore the story of a whole human life, with all its pain, passions, achievements and losses is to be unfolded in a flash (only two hours pass between the departure and return of the ferry), in a great cri du coeur, at the spot 352 where the author met Andrei Sokolov, “there was that kind of stillness that falls on deserted places only late in the autumn or at the very beginning of spring" (6).

p One feels that only here, only in this setting, could the story of this Russian soldier and working man be told with that gripping frankness of a confession and the powerful impact of tragedy.

p In the very first description right at the beginning of the story we already come across the motif of “a hard road”. At first it is the road of the author who had to go on a journey to see to some urgent business or other. “Where the going was particularly heavy for the horses we got out and walked. It was hard to walk through the slushy snow, which squelched under our boots, but the roadside was still coated with a glittering crust of ice, and there it was even harder" (5). Note the insistent reiteration of “hard”, “heavy”.

p The description of the author’s road prepares for the appearance of Andrei Sokolov and Vanya. They were going along the same hard road, moreover, they were going along it on foot. The “hard road" acquires added overtones. A note of weariness accompanies the account of the appearance of the travellers: “They tramped wearily....’", “taking the half-empty rucksack off his back, the father sat down heavily beside me...” (author’s italics).

p Gradually the motif of the “hard road" acquires more and more overtones and shades of meaning as a philosophical generalisation.

p Andrei Sokolov’s words addressed to the author: “No, it’s no job for a man to be travelling with someone like him, not on foot anyway,” already have the broader interpretation of road and journey and human life.

p The motif develops into a tense, dramatic tale with its staggering wealth of content made of the very stuff of life, a tale of a hard road of life, the fate of a man along the paths of war where he had a “good bellyful of trouble".

p This “musical” development of the theme, the wealth of motifs and the philosophy and shades of meaning they contain, are typical features of Sholokhov’s works. What we have is a story that is at the same time a reflection on the fate of people, raised from the particular and the concrete to the universal.

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p The introductory section not only sets the tone for the story but in imagery and sense overtones links up with what follows, so that all the parts form an artistic whole.

p Each part of Andrei Sokolov’s story is perfectly rounded off and self-sufficient as regards subject-matter, yet at the same time contains motifs common to all the other parts, which by being repeated enhance the tragic intensity of the whole.

p In each part of the story Sholokhov gives us a close-up of a side of Andrei Sokolov’s character. We see him in all kinds of situations: at home with his family, as a soldier at the front, in captivity, and so on.

p The first part of Andrei Sokolov’s story concerns his life before the war, up to his parling with his family when ho was called up.

p The account is remarkable for being so sparing in details. The beginning is as brief arid restrained as a curriculum vitae. “To start with, my life was just ordinary. I’m from the Voronezh Province, born there in 1900. During the Civil War I was in the Red Army, in Kikvidze’s division...” (10).

p The emotional pivot of this first part of the story is the description of his relations with his wife and family, and we know what a loving husband and father he was.

p Although he doesn’t omit to tell of his work and everyday cares (“In ’twenty-nine I got interested in motors, I learned to drive and started to work on a lorry.... Those ten years I worked day and night. I earned good money and we lived no worse than other folk—Before the war we built ourselves a little cottage with two rooms and a shed and a little porch”), yet again and again he returns to the memory of his wife and family that haunts and tortures him so.

p His wife always comes first in his recollections. “Yes, I got a good woman there! Good-tempered, cheerful, always anxious to please. And smart she was, too—na comparison with me.”

p He searches desperately hard for the right words to express the beauty and goodness he had found in his wife, and those he finds speak of his love and life-long fidelity.

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p “Just looking at her from the side, as you might say. she wasn’t all thai striking, hut, you see, 1 wasn’t looking at her from the side, I was looking straight at her. And for me there was no more beautiful woman in the whole world, and there never will he.”

p This simple, involuntary vow of eternal fidelity to his wife’s memory gives us an insight into the essence of the man.

p Because of a painful detail his farewell with his wife when he left for the front was engraved for ever in his mind. When his wife had cried out, grief-stricken. “Andrei ... my darling ... we’ll never ... never see each oilier again ... in this world...” he had pushed her away roughly.

p The second part of Andrei Sokolov’s story begins with the words: “Why did I push her away like that? Even now, when I remember, it’s like a blunl knife Iwisling in my hearl" (16).

p Later, al Ihe end of Ihe second part of his slory, when recounting the circumstances of his family’s death, the memory of thai farewell scene at the railway station returns again and a note of hopeless sorrow creeps into his voice. “That woman’s heart of hers must have known all along we were nol to see each other again in this world. And I had pushed her away...” (40).

p This leitmotif “I had pushed her away" contains boundless sorrow, all the pain of a heart that is still unreconciled to its loss. It is not a requiem, but a cry of pain that time has not dulled.

p The second part of the story covers a longer period of time and packs more events: the war, capture, escape, the hospital and the news of his family’s death.

p The moral concepts, and social and psychological factors that largely guided Andrei Sokolov in his actions are most evident in these events. Andrei Sokolov is a true citizen in the finest meaning of the word.

p The heroic theme of the story, the affirmation of valour and patriotism, comradeship and self-sacrifice as splendid human qualities rings stronger and stronger, gradually acquiring more and more new motifs. We come lo see -what was at first hidden from us, what the very air he breathed had instilled in Andrei Sokolov, whal had made him a man of the new world, the world of socialism, 355 and what was for him an inexhaustible well-spring of strength and firmness.

p “That’s what a man’s for, that’s what you’re a soldier for—to put up with everything, to bear everything, if need be.” These brave words are the key to Andrei Sokolov’s nature. He says them in the course of a short reflection on how a man should behave at the front. It is a remark made in passing, with no intention of “making a point”. It sounds all the more convincing as being not merely a conviction but an inner call to duly, a norm of behaviour, part of his very nature.

p Here we have that heroic theme of “casual heroism”, unassuming heroes that are often unaware that they are performing a great feat, which underlies all of Sholokhov’s work from his early talcs to They Fought for Their Fatherland.

p “To put up with everything, to hear everything, if need be.” This same idea is repeated in the author’s reflections at the end of Ihe slory, where it acquires wider socio-historical overtones, as an affirmation of the essence of Andrei Sokolov’s life. His whole life, in his everyday doings, in his flights of valour, and in his moments of desperation, was heroic devotion lo his country, to all that is fine and humane.

p The theme of Ihe heroism of Ihe people in the war bursts forth powerfully in Andrei Sokolov’s story when he is reflecting on what a soldier should be like, when he speaks of the tremendous burden the women and children had to bear on the home front (“... Ihose poor unhappy women and kids are having just as bad a time of it back home as we are. Why, they were carrying the whole country on their shoulders. And what shoulders our women and children must have had not to give in under a weight like lhal! But they didn’t give in, they stuck it out!”), and also when he describes the hardships he suffered as a POW.

p From his simple modesl accounl one gets the impression that he had done nothing special. At the front he “was wounded twice, but only slightly bolh times”. Yet from the events that follow, from the episodes of and following his capture, we gradually see all the modest, unostentatious valour, human pride and dignity of which Ihis “ordinary” man was capable.

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p When Andrei Sokolov had to get through with a lorryload of shells to the howitzer batteries in the extremely awkward situation, when the Germans were pressing forward with a hard attack, he didn’t stop to ask himself whether it was possible or not. The soldier’s code involves readiness to risk one’s life for one’s comrades.

p “’Can you get through, Sokolov?’ asks the commander of our company. He need never have asked. Was I going to sit there twiddling my thumbs while my mates got killed? ’What are you talking about!’ I told him. ’I’ve got to get through, and that’s that.’ ’Get cracking then.’ he says, ’and step on it!’" (17-18).

p “Strike me, if it wasn’t our infantry running back across the field on both sides of the road with shells bursting among them. What was I to do? I couldn’t turn back, could I? So I gave her all she’s got. There was only about a kilometre to go to the battery, I had already turned off the road, but I never reached them, mate" (18).

p Andrei Sokolov is full of open admiration and approval for the doctor who goes on with his job after being taken prisoner. “There was a real doctor for you. Even shut up like that, in pitch darkness, he went on doing his great work" (23).

p Andrei Sokolov distinguished between the “real”, the “genuine” and the false with the remarkable accuracy that comes from great civic consciousness.

p He did not hesitate to play a decisive part in the drama that took place before his very eyes, when “a fellow with a big fleshy face" threatened to betray his platoon commander to the Germans. He loathes and despises the inhuman principle of “saving one’s hide" which the other man is guided by. He feels a strong revulsion for the whole moral nature of the man. “The vileness of what I’d heard gave me the shivers.” He finished the traitor off in the night, and felt no pity: “He was worse than the enemy, he was a traitor.”

p We are shown ever new facets of this man’s indomitable courage, the unflinching firmness of his convictions and beliefs, his loyalty and will to live.

p He escapes and is recaptured. The Germans beat him and set bloodhounds on him. “They took me back to camp, naked and bloody as I was. I got a month in 357 solitary for trying to escape, but I was still alive. Yes, I managed to keep alive somehow" (27, author’s italics).

p Later on, though dulled with suffering, this theme of faith in life reappears, the faith and hope that give a man the strength to go on. “Why, when I had been a prisoner, nearly every night, under my breath, of course, I had talked to Irina and the kids, tried to cheer them up by telling them I’d come home and they mustn’t cry. I’m tough. I said. I can stand it, we’ll all be together again one day" (40).

p Andrei Sokolov’s passionate will to live is also a noble, heroic quality. Sholokhov stresses this heroism, this indomitable lust for life and pride by comparing these fine human qualities with those of the other side, the camp of war and fascism.

p As a prisoner Andrei Sokolov is brought face to face with the fascists. Sholokhov exposes the fascist ideology, the very essence of fascism in what appear to be ordinary, mundane situations and occurrences.

p Sholokhov sees the inhuman, fascist element in the way the “black-haired” looter took the wounded Andrei Sokolov’s boots, and wanted to shoot him; in the “elderly corporal or something" who stopped him, felt Andrei Sokolov’s muscle and pointed along the road to the west, “as much as to say: ‘Off you go, you mule, and work for our Reich.’ Thrifty type he was, the son-of-a-bitch!" (20).

p These two instant portraits of rank-and-file fascists, “the thief" and the “thrifty one”, stand as it were on the threshold of that fascist inferno that Andrei Sokolov is to go through.

p In his impassioned account of the pain, sufferings and humiliations he suffered there, the motif of implacable hatred for fascism rises with gathering intensity.

p “When I remember all we had to suffer out there, in Germany, when I remember all my mates who were tortured to death in those camps, my heart comes up in my throat and it’s hard to breathe.... And those damned bastards lammed into us like no man here ever beat an animal. Punching us, kicking us, beating us with rubber truncheons, with any lump of iron they happened to have handy, not to mention their rifle butts and sticks—But you had to work, and not say a word, and the work 358 we did would have been a lot too much for a carl-horse, I reckon" (27-28).

p There are comparatively few details in Andrei Sokolov’s account of his life as a prisoner. Indeed, throughout The Fate of a Man generalised images, “conclusions” arrived at through thought and feelings, condensations of all that has been experienced, are the rule. The authenticity is achieved not through piling up realistic details, hut through real feeling that is right on the mark.

p The scene with the camp commandant Miiller. concrete though it is in the extreme, at the same time has a universal, symbolic significance. The tight moment in Andrei Sokolov’s life, when death passed him by. and he “only felt the cold breath of it" coincides in time with one of the decisive struggles in the life of the Soviet people as a whole, the battle of Stalingrad.

p It is on this concrete historical foundation that the symbolic generalisation rests. The city on the Volga lies burning and in ruins and the decisive moment of the dayand-night struggle for it has arrived—the carnp commandant with his bunch of SS thugs are already celebrating victory. And here is a tiny grain of sand, a Russian soldier weakened by hunger and brutal treatment behind the barbed wire of a concentration camp. The defenceless prisoner Andrei Sokolov and the Lagerfiihrer Miiller are brought together at a moment that would seem to give the latter a tremendous psychological advantage: “There was a rumour in the camp that the Germans had taken Stalingrad and were pressing on into Siberia—And every day the camp guards were drinking and bawling out their songs, rejoicing for all they were worth" (29).

p The scene with the camp commandant is envisaged as a moral duel, and is full of significant socio-historical undertones.

p Müller decided to humiliate the Russian soldier for one last time before killing him for daring to make free with his tongue: “Before you die. Russian Ivan, drink to the triumph of German arms.”

p At this point the moral factor comes into play that so often decides the fate not only of individuals but of whole nations.

p Suddenly patriotism, unbroken courage and daring welled up in the weak, defenceless man who was prepared 359 to meet his end. “Me, a Russian soldier... drink to the victory of German arms?" In the moments that follow Andrei Sokolov somehow represents his whole people, and has the proud courage and strength of millions behind him. This is one of the culminating moments of the story.

p He is saved by his self-control and firmness. He drinks three glasses, one after another “to his own death”, without letting it go to his head. We have already learned how he had been a hard drinker at one time: “I could hold a lot of drink.” lie knew how he could impress his enemies in this situation. He drank the first glass without eating anything, drank the second, and “again I didn’t touch the food. I was staking everything on courage, you see”. After the third he “bit off a little bit of bread and put the rest down on the table. I wanted to show the bastards that even though I was half dead with hunger I wasn’t going to choke myself with the scraps they threw me, that I had my own, Russian dignity and pride, and that they hadn’t turned me into an animal as they had wanted to.”

p This may have been a very primitive way of impressing them, but it was on the moral level for those drunken fascists celebrating “victory” to appreciate.

p Müller’s reply: “Look here, Sokolov, you’re a real Russian soldier. You’re a fine soldier. I am a soldier, too, and I respect a worthy enemy. I shall not shoot you" is taken by some to be suggesting that even the most hardened fascist is moved to open admiration by courage. I feel that it is more a question of patronising complacency that even the most brutal enemy is capable of in an hour of triumph. “What is more, today our gallant armies have reached the Volga and taken complete possession of Stalingrad. That is a great joy for us, and therefore I graciously grant you your life.”

p I do feel that there is just one false note in the episode about the camp commandant, however. I hardly think that hearing this brutal butcher cursing in Russian could have aroused something like pleasant memories for the poor unfortunates in his power: “The words sounded like our own, it was like a breath of air from over there.”

p The return to the family theme, the main theme of the first part of Andrei Sokolov’s story comes in a great 360 explosion of tragedy, on a note of crushing human grief—the news that his family have been killed, the visit to Voronezh, and the death of his son Anatoly in Berlin. The third part of the story is pervaded with a tense struggle between different motifs: tragic and heroic; hopeless despair (“I buried my last joy and hope in that foreign German soil, the battery fired a volley to send off their commander on his long journey, and something seemed to snap inside me...”); day after day of unbearable suffering (“I couldn’t cry. I reckon the tears dried up in my heart. Perhaps that’s why it still hurts so much”, “In the daytime I always keep a firm grip on myself, you’ll never get a sigh out of me. But sometimes I wake up at night and my pillow’s wet through”); and glimmers of hope, calling him back to life with a child’s voice.

p Andrei Sokolov reveals his true greatness in his attitude to the little orphan Vanya, who became his hope, joy and consolation.

p The scene where Andrei Sokolov “found” Vanya and adopted him is one of the most poignant in the book for its psychological penetration and emotional accuracy.

War and the ideology of fascism are bound up in the story as a real concrete evil, which can and must be overcome. In Andrei Sokolov’s life, all that was good, human, progressive and engendered by peaceful labour engaged in the struggle with this terrible evil. The man of the socialist world with his faith and hope proved stronger than war. He weathered the furious storm, and emerged from it victorious. It was this human, triumphant note that gave the story its essential heroic tone.

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