At the Bidding of the Heart

The companion volume to Yakimenko's critical study, issued in the same year. That book was the criticism; this is the man.

Y. Lukin has gathered something over a hundred of Sholokhov's articles, speeches, letters, telegrams and interviews, arranged them under three headings - Life, The Writer, Young People - and prefaced them with an essay of his own. The war years are covered almost month by month; the Nobel Prize in exhaustive detail; and there is a great deal on his correspondents and his readers, on the craft of writing, and on the Don country he never left.

It is worth knowing the shape of the collection before opening it. The earliest item is from 1934, the latest from the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in 1971. Sholokhov was thirty in 1934 and had been publishing for nine years: Tales from the Don, three books of And Quiet Flows the Don and the first book of Virgin Soil Upturned were already out, and he had lived through collectivisation in the Veshenskaya district as a resident rather than a visitor. None of that period is represented. The volume opens in the year of the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, the congress that dissolved the literary factions into a single Union and made socialist realism the statutory method.

A compilation reveals its compiler, and every anthology is an argument about what a life consisted of. This one can be checked against the life.

Translated by Olga Shartse.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on what the collection leaves out and what Sholokhov was writing to Stalin in the years it skips.