The Magical Chorus

The monumental socialist realist paintings and sculptures of the Stalin period that depicted the rulers and their meetings with the people, the exploits of heroes, and mass demonstrations and festivities should also be viewed as ritual objects, even if they are in museums. Only by situating these works in a historical and social context can we appreciate the craft of their creators, crowned by Stalin Prizes, and to see that the awards were not given without good reason.

Probably the most controversial figure of the first group of Stalin Prize winners was Mikhail Sholokhov, who later became the third Russian Nobel laureate. The range of opinions about Sholokhov is astounding even for the contentious twentieth century—from recognition of him as a great writer, one of the world classics of our time, to Solzhenitsyn’s disdainful remarks: “With Sholokhov, one shouldn’t even speak of whether he’s educated or not, but if he is literate or not.”⁸ This about the man who in 1939 became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Stalin gave Sholokhov the prize for his epic novel The Quiet Don (also known in the West as And Quiet Flows the Don), depicting the tragic trajectory of the Don Cossack Grigory Melekhov in the years of World War I and the Civil War, against the background of the period’s tectonic social shifts. Even Solzhenitsyn has high regard for the novel; what then was the cause for his dismissive attitude toward Sholokhov?

As soon as the twenty-three-year-old Sholokhov published the novel in 1928, rumors began circulating that he was not the real author, but had plagiarized the manuscript (or diaries) of another writer, Fedor Kryukov, who died in 1920; other sources were also mentioned. With time the search for the person behind The Quiet Don turned into a small industry, with thick volumes written pro and contra.

This problem, considering that Sholokhov’s archives for the 1920s and 1930s are missing (allegedly burned during World War II), is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. So in this case, following Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes, we can treat the question of “authorship” as a conditional one. Sholokhov, contrary to the opinion of his numerous foes, was a major figure and an ambivalent one, and he remains inseparable from the dramatic fate of The Quiet Don.

The legend that the Soviet regime embraced Don from the beginning has become entrenched. But in reality it was not the case. Sholokhov did not come from a proletarian background, growing up in a wealthy family, and the “proletarian” critics immediately dismissed the novel as “an idealization of the kulaks and White Guards.” When it came to the publication of the third and final volume, Sholokhov encountered stiff resistance: influential literary bureaucrats, all-powerful Fadeyev among them, felt that the publication of this book “would give great satisfaction to our enemies, the White Guards, who emigrated.”⁹ It was held up for more than two years.

Sholokhov turned to his patron Gorky for support and in July 1931 the young writer met at Gorky’s apartment with the country’s main censor, Stalin. He already knew the first two volumes and read the third in manuscript before the meeting, and at Gorky’s (who, as Sholokhov recalled, kept quiet, smoked, and burned matches over the ashtray) he interrogated Sholokhov: why were the Whites shown “in a soft way” in The Quiet Don? On what documents was the novel based? (Knowing about the plagiarism charges, Stalin must have been checking Sholokhov’s historical erudition.)

In self-defense, Sholokhov argued that General Lavr Kornilov, who fought against the Bolsheviks on the Don River, was “subjectively an honest man.” The writer later recalled that Stalin’s “yellow eyes narrowed like a tiger’s before it leaps,” but the ruler continued the argument with restraint, in his favorite catechistic manner: “A subjectively honest man is one who is with the people, who fights for the good of the people.” Kornilov had gone against the people, had spilled a “sea of blood.” How could he be an honest man?

Sholokhov was forced to agree. Stalin must have been pleased with his conversation with the short and boyishly thin twenty-six-year-old with a shock of curls over his large forehead. His resolution was: “The depiction of the course of events in the third book of The Quiet Don works in our favor, for the Revolution. We will publish it!”¹⁰

But Sholokhov’s foes did not lay down their weapons. The discussion of The Quiet Don at the Stalin Prize Committee was a battlefield. The great filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, who created one of the masterpieces of Soviet silent film, Earth (1930), and who was one of Stalin’s favorites (he got the Stalin Prize for his film Shchors, about Ukraine during the Civil War), rose to an emotional speech. “I read the book The Quiet Don with a feeling of great inner dissatisfaction…. I can summarize my impressions this way: for centuries the quiet Don lived, Cossack men and women rode horses, drank, and sang…their life was juicy, aromatic, stable, and warm. The Revolution came, Soviet rule and the Bolsheviks destroyed the quiet Don, chased people away, pitted brother against brother, father against son, husband against wife, impoverished the country…infected it with gonorrhea and syphilis, sowed filth, anger, and pushed the strong men with character into banditry…. And so it ended. That is an enormous mistake in the author’s concept.”¹¹

Other members of the Committee also spoke out against The Quiet Don, but the most damning conclusion about the novel came from Fadeyev, head of the Writers’ Union of the USSR then (and known as Stalin’s trusted person): “My personal opinion is that it does not show the victory of the Stalinist idea.” Fadeyev later admitted to Sholokhov that he had voted against him. But Sholokhov, as we know, received the prize and appeared on the front page of Pravda. Why?

The answer lies in part in the fact that Stalin apparently encouraged the writer not only for The Quiet Don but also for the first part of his second novel, which had been published by then. Virgin Soil Upturned was about collectivization, that is, a very important topic for the country and for Stalin personally. Stalin’s opinion of the book is reflected in a letter to his henchman Lazar Kaganovich, dated June 7, 1932: “An interesting work! You can see that Sholokhov studied the kolkhozes on the Don. Sholokhov, I believe, has a great creative gift. Besides which, he is a very conscientious writer: he writes about things he knows well.”¹² (That is, Stalin had further confirmation that Sholokhov was not a plagiarist.)

But that is not all. It seems that Stalin was rewarding Sholokhov’s actions, about which very few people knew then. They remained a secret for many years and even though they were first mentioned by Nikita Khrushchev in 1963, the details of the story did not surface until the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, when the correspondence between Sholokhov and Stalin was declassified.

Fifteen letters and notes from Sholokhov to Stalin, and a letter and two telegrams from Stalin to Sholokhov read like a riveting novel, with the difference that this is the true (albeit not complete) story of the interactions of the ruler and the writer over the most tragic events of that era, collectivization and the Great Terror.

Sholokhov, not yet thirty, sent the first letters to Stalin in 1931–1933, during the throes of an agricultural crisis caused by the forced collectivization. In order to supply the cities with food, the government confiscated all the grain the kolkhoz farmers had. Sholokhov depicted the situation straightforwardly, with rare candor and directness: “Right now kolkhoz farmers and individual farmers are starving to death; adults and children are swelling and eating everything that humans are not supposed to eat, starting with carrion and ending with oak bark and all kinds of swamp roots.”¹³ In another letter he wrote, “It is so bitter, Comrade Stalin! Your heart bleeds when you see it with your own eyes.”

Sholokhov describes the “disgusting ‘methods’ of torture, beatings, and humiliations” used to find out where