Sholokhov: A critical appreciation

A good book about a great one, by a literary scholar rather than an apparatus functionary, and it reads like it: close comparison of magazine and book versions, patient analysis of how a novel's chapters are built, careful attention to imagery, and archival recovery of the author's correspondence.

Yakimenko's textual work is real scholarship. He tracks And Quiet Flows the Don through the magazine Oktyabr, where book three began in 1929, was interrupted and resumed in 1932, and compares the variants against the final text - showing how a line in Grigory Melekhov's central monologue was cut as incompatible with the character, and how Sholokhov moved from direct statement of Grigory's doubts to an obliquer reported speech that leaves the question open. He reconstructs the changing plans for book four and for the second book of Virgin Soil Upturned from the author's own announcements in the press of 1934 and 1935, including intentions later abandoned. His analysis of how the meeting that votes to evict the kulak families is prepared eight chapters in advance is the kind of thing criticism exists for.

Most valuable of all, he prints at length Sholokhov's letter to Gorky of 6 June 1931, defending the part of the novel dealing with the Veshenskaya rising against the officials blocking its publication - and telling Gorky flatly that the rising arose from exaggerated encroachments on the interests of the middle-peasant Cossacks. Yakimenko not only quotes it but endorses it.

Translated by Brian Bean. Companion volume to At the Bidding of the Heart.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on exactly where the book stops.