This is the companion volume to Lev Yakimenko's Sholokhov: A Critical Appreciation, which Progress Publishers issued in English 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 result is not a book Sholokhov wrote. It is a book made out of Sholokhov, and what makes it worth republishing is that a compilation reveals its compiler. Every anthology is an argument about what a life consisted of. This one can be checked against the life.
Start with the dates, because they are the first finding.
The earliest item in the entire volume is from 1934. The latest is the speech to the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in 1971. Between those two points Lukin covers thirty-seven years densely — the war years almost month by month, the Nobel Prize in exhaustive detail, cosmonauts, fishery ministers, New Year greetings. Before 1934 there is nothing at all.
Sholokhov was thirty in 1934 and had been publishing for nine years. He had brought out Tales from the Don, three books of And Quiet Flows the Don, and the first book of Virgin Soil Upturned. He had lived through collectivisation in the Veshenskaya district as a resident, not a visitor. He had fought a long battle with the RAPP officials over the sixth part of the novel and won it with Gorky's help. 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. Lukin's Sholokhov begins existing as a public man at precisely the moment the public role was standardised.
That is the shape of the hole. Now the piece the reader will go looking for.
"Cossack Collective Farms" stands third in Part I, between "On the Don" and "Vileness", and the title promises the great subject. It is dated 1941. It is a harvest dispatch, written for Krasnaya Zvezda, the army paper — Sholokhov says so inside it — about the first wartime reaping on the Don six weeks after the German invasion. It opens: "Harvesting was in full swing on the boundless Don fields." Combine operators say their wives can replace them at the wheel; an elderly farmer says "Nature herself is for us and against Hitler"; carts move to the Grain Purveyance Stores "loaded high with sacks of newly reaped grain". A man at the Stalinets collective farm supplies the one sentence in the piece that touches collectivisation at all: "We stopped sweating once collective farms were started. Soviet power relieved us from backbreaking toil."
It is a competent, warm, entirely honourable piece of war reporting, and it has nothing whatever to do with what its title leads a reader to expect. Nothing in this book does. There is no article about collectivisation in it. The one moment the subject is named directly is a 1934 speech to workers at the Lenzavod factory, where Sholokhov mentions in passing that he "started writing my Virgin Soil Upturned in 1930, hot on the heels of the happenings which radically changed the rural world: the elimination of the kulaks (well-to-do peasants) as a class, large-scale collectivisation, and the mass movement of the peasantry to unite into collective farms" — and then turns immediately to the difficulty of keeping up with a fast-changing subject. The words famine and starvation do not appear in the book in connection with 1932 or 1933. Neither year is mentioned. The one occurrence of the figure 1933 is a footnote reference to an issue of a literary journal.
Set that beside what we know Sholokhov was doing in the spring of 1933. From Veshenskaya he wrote to Stalin — at length, more than once — describing the requisition brigades in his district: food confiscated down to the last stocks, collective farmers beaten and tortured to make them give up grain they did not have, people dying of hunger. He named officials. He asked for grain and for an investigation. He got both; Stalin also replied that the peasants of the district were themselves waging a quiet sabotage war against Soviet power. Those letters stayed unpublished in the USSR until glasnost, and Lukin in the early 1970s could not have printed them. That constraint is real and should be stated as one.
But the constraint does not cover the gap, because what Sholokhov could print in the 1930s was not nothing, and Lukin has printed some of it. Here is Sholokhov in 1934, in a foreword written for the English edition of And Quiet Flows the Don, answering British reviewers who had called his portrayal of reality cruel: "In the former case I accept the rebuke, for I think that a writer who varnishes reality to the detriment of truth and spares the feelings of his readers because he wants to adapt himself to them, is a bad writer. My novel is not one of those books people read during their after-dinner siesta, and the sole purpose of which is to help digestion." That was written for foreign readers in the year after the famine, by a man who had watched it and reported it privately to the head of the state. It is one of the finest sentences in this book and it convicts everything around it.
Hunger does appear once. In "A Word About Motherland", dated 1948, Sholokhov records an old collective farm chairman talking about the drought of 1946: "I think that in the old days half of the population would have died from hunger in a drought like that one. ... When we came to grief in that drought, the state helped us out with grain and seeds. We supported people in every way we could, we saw them through the trouble, and everyone survived." The drought of 1946 was followed by a famine across the grain regions of the USSR in 1946–47. It is much less studied than 1932–33 and its death toll is genuinely contested; serious estimates run to a million or more. Hunger is permitted into this book exactly once, in the past conditional, as something that would have happened under the old order and did not happen under the new.
Now the second matter, and it is the reason this volume is more interesting than its companion.
Yakimenko's monograph does not mention the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, or Sholokhov's speech about them at the Twenty-Third Party Congress in April 1966. That silence was predictable. The prediction fails here. Lukin prints the speech. It is in Part I, in sequence, under the title "Speech at the 23rd Party Congress", complete, with no cuts marked and no editorial note.
The names are not in it. Sholokhov never used them from the rostrum. What he said is this:
"It is a very different matter when an author writes one thing in the Soviet Union and publishes something else abroad. He uses the same Russian language in both cases, but in the first for better camouflage, and in the second for desecrating this language with his rabid hatred and malice against everything Soviet, against everything that is precious and sacred to us."
He moves to the metaphor the speech is remembered for — "there is nothing more blasphemous and vile than slandering one's own mother, insulting her maliciously, and raising one's hand to strike her!" — and then turns on the people who had petitioned for the defendants:
"It's not the writers who have slandered our country and flung mud at what is very precious to us that I feel shame for. They are amoral. But I do feel shame for people who are trying to defend these writers, no matter what prompts them to do so. And I feel doubly ashamed of people who are offering their services and applying for permission to go bail for these convicted apostates."
Then the sentence itself:
"There are some who, invoking humanism, bewail the sternness of the verdict. I see here a group of delegates from the Party organisation of our Soviet Army, and I wonder what they would do if traitors were discovered in one of their units? Our soldiers know better than anyone else that humanism and slobbery are different things altogether. "There's something else I'm thinking of. Had this happened in the memorable 1920s when cases were tried more by revolutionary justice than the strictly demarcated clauses of the Criminal Code, a very different, oh so very different punishment would have been meted out to these turncoats! And here, if you please, people are talking about the 'sternness' of the verdict!"
Sinyavsky had been given seven years, Daniel five. The "very different punishment" is not left to the imagination.
It ends with a defence of criticism: "do not worry about the safety of criticism in our country. We are supporting and developing criticism. And much sharp criticism has been voiced at the present congress too. However, slander is not criticism, and mud from a puddle is not paint from an artist's palette."
Two things must be said about the way this appears in the book, and they cut opposite ways.
The first is to Lukin's credit, or at least to his honesty as an editor: he printed it. He could have dropped one item from a volume of a hundred and no reviewer would have noticed. He did not. A reader of this book in English in 1973 could read the whole thing in Sholokhov's own words and form a judgment.
The second is what Lukin does with it in his own introductory essay. He quotes the speech there too — and he quotes two paragraphs, the harmless ones about the Nobel address and about Communists speaking as Communists wherever they are, and stops. The paragraph he stops at is the one immediately preceding "It is a very different matter when an author writes one thing in the Soviet Union and publishes something else abroad." The excerpt is cut, to the sentence, at the edge of the thing the speech is famous for. Lukin knew exactly which paragraph he was leaving out. He put it back a hundred and fifty pages later, where nobody skimming an introduction would meet it.
Then look at what sits next to it. Lukin's arrangement is chronological, so he did not have to contrive this; the sequence made it for him. In December 1965 Sholokhov stood in Stockholm Town Hall and defined the writer's mission: "to be honest with the reader, to tell people the truth, perhaps the hard truth but always the brave truth." On 1 January 1966 he wished Pravda's readers a good year. On 10 January he thanked Leipzig University for a doctorate. In April he told the Congress that the sentences were too light. And the very next item in the book, from later in 1966, is a letter to a writers' meeting in Baku titled "A Humanist Is the Man Who Fights", which argues — about Vietnam, and it is a decent argument about Vietnam — that "a true humanist will fight to avert the hand of the murderer and render his evil will harmless, and not merely pity the poor victim". Five items, thirteen months. Nobody had to editorialise. The reader can watch it happen.
The reply came, and it came from Moscow. Lidia Chukovskaya, author of The Deserted House, "wrote an open letter to Mikhail Sholokov, the author of And Quiet Flows the Don, denouncing him for demanding stiffer sentences for Andrei D. Sinyavsky and Yuli M. Daniel" — the misspelling is Intercontinental Press's. Three years later Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Writers' Union of the Russian Republic, threw it in his expellers' faces: "Thus neither [Mikhail] Sholokov nor all of you put together dared to answer the famous letter of Lidiya Chukovskaya, pride of Russian essayists." Both passages are in Intercontinental Press, vol. 7 no. 40, 1 December 1969, p. 1066. Chukovskaya's letter itself appeared in English in World Outlook for 9 December 1966, an issue this series does not hold; nothing summarised here should be read as standing in for the document.
And the year this translation reached English readers, he did it again. On 30 August 1973 thirty-one Soviet writers signed an open letter condemning Andrei Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. "Among the signers was Mikhail Sholokhov, Nobel prize-winning author of And Quiet Flows the Don. Sholokhov has previously sided with the bureaucrats against dissidents," reported Intercontinental Press on 10 September 1973 (vol. 11 no. 31). Lukin's book and that signature are the same twelve months.
Now the harder question, which is what else the selection tells you, and here the book gives more than its compiler can have intended.
Trotsky's name occurs exactly once in these hundred-odd items. It is 1937, in "About the Soviet Writer", where Sholokhov is talking to a Spanish delegation about the civil war in Spain: "we are deeply perturbed by developments such as the events which took place in Catalonia a short while ago when Trotskyite-fascist elements, provoking certain groups of anarchists to action, attempted to organise a mutiny in the rear of the republican front with the aim of undermining the Popular Front." He draws the moral at once: "Everyone knows that Soviet power waged an uncompromising struggle against the enemies of the working class, and we won because we ruthlessly smashed and routed all traitors to the cause."
That is the Barcelona May Days of 1937, and the "Trotskyite-fascist elements" are the POUM, whose leader Andreu Nin was abducted and killed by Soviet agents in June of that year, and the anarchists of the CNT. It is the standard Comintern line delivered in the standard words. The single mention of Trotsky in a book by the greatest novelist of the Don is a slander about Spain, and it arrives with a rider recommending the method. This is what L. Yakovlev was describing four years later, in July 1941, when he surveyed the flight of Soviet writers from contemporary subjects, named Sholokhov first among "the outstanding Soviet writers" who had taken refuge in the past, and added the footnote: "it is no simple task to provide a realistic depiction of the civil war without once mentioning the name of Leon Trotsky or other legendary heroes of the Red Army and always portraying Stalin as a genius" (Fourth International, vol. 2 no. 6, July 1941).
Stalin, oddly, is nearly absent. He appears as a person exactly once in the whole volume: "We remember the words of Comrade Stalin: 'Great energy is born only for a great aim'", in a 1952 report on the Volga-Don canal. Otherwise there are the Stalin Prize, Stalingrad, and silence. This is a 1973 compilation covering 1934 to 1971 and it has been swept. Whether Lukin cut Stalin out or Sholokhov simply said less about him than most, the effect is the same: a public career spanning the Terror, the war and the Twentieth Congress, from which the central political fact of half of it has been removed without trace.
There is also this, which is the most uncomfortable page in the book and which Lukin cannot have read closely. In March 1939, at the Eighteenth Party Congress, Sholokhov spoke — mostly about the paper allocation for fiction, an old grievance of his and a real one. He wanted more paper for the classics, and to explain why they deserved it he described what had been done to Russian writers:
"And then there is that other category of writers who in the remote past were repaid for their genius with sentences of hard labour in Siberia and with banishment, they were pilloried, they were conscripted into the army as privates, they were crushed under by the obtuse might of the state machine and the church, or were simply killed with the hands of obligingly unscrupulous officers. The responsibility for this disgrace, this egregious shamelessness lies with the accursed regime which our people and our Party put an end to in 1917."
Osip Mandelstam had died in a transit camp near Vladivostok three months earlier. Boris Pilnyak had been shot in April 1938. Isaac Babel was arrested six weeks after this speech and shot in January 1940. Sholokhov himself went to Stalin in these years to get his Veshenskaya friends out of the cells, and got some of them out. He knew. Standing at the rostrum in 1939 he denounced the persecution of writers, in the past tense, and assigned the responsibility to the tsars.
Give him what he is owed, because a great deal is owed and the case above is worthless without it.
The war journalism is not cynical and was not written from a desk in Moscow. "On the Way to the Front", "First Encounters", "Prisoners-of-War", "The Science of Hatred" and the letter to besieged Leningrad — "We know how hard it is for you to live, work and fight while surrounded by the enemy" — were produced under fire by a man who was there, and they hold up. The wounded birch in the shelled clearing that opens "The Science of Hatred", the ex-prisoner Kuznetsov in "On the Don" explaining quietly that he will take German privates prisoner but not their officers and asking his neighbours' pardon for it — these are the work of a real writer doing war reporting properly, which is by listening.
The Twentieth Congress speech of February 1956 is genuinely brave and very funny. Sholokhov told the Congress that the Writers' Union's 3,773 members "largely consists of 'dead souls'", that its secretary's statistics on books published were "in plain words ... called eyewash", that the profession had "built ourselves a literary 'Dnieproges' dam from books written twenty or thirty years ago" and hid behind it, and that the writers of Moscow lived in "a sort of magic triangle: Moscow—dacha—seaside resort". He attacked Fadeyev, the Union's General Secretary, by name and to his face: "For years Fadeyev kept busy attending literary discussions, delivering reports, distributing the flats among writers and never wrote a word." Fadeyev shot himself three months later. And the speech's most quoted line is a good one: "Speaking directly with my own Party I have to say the truth, however bitter, about our literature."
Note what it is a speech about, though. It was delivered at the Twentieth Congress, and it contains not a syllable about the thing the Twentieth Congress was. The words personality cult do not occur anywhere in this book.
The same independence, and the same limit, marks the 1966 Congress speech. Having demanded harsher sentences, Sholokhov spent the second half of it on Lake Baikal, on a Volgograd factory that discharged untreated waste and killed sturgeon along four hundred kilometres of the Volga, on the pollution of the Don and the collapse of the Azov fisheries, and on the absurdity of Soviet planning, which he illustrated with a factory at Kalyazin rebuilt four times in ten years for four different products. He mocked a minister to his face and mocked himself for going begging: "you no longer address the Minister as 'Comrade Minister' in the formal manner, but ingratiatingly as 'Dear Ivan Ivanovich'." Almost nobody in that hall would have said any of it. It is real civic courage, spent on fish and slate and soya sauce, by a man who forty minutes earlier had regretted that two writers were not shot.
And there is one sentence in this book that answers Yakimenko's central evasion. Yakimenko wondered in print whether Sholokhov had meant to write about "the gross distortions in the policy of collectivisation which had such tragic consequences in 1932 and 1933", and concluded that the question "cannot be answered without the help of the author". Here is the author, in 1957, in a piece called "Keep in Step with the Party, with the People":
"if you take a practical view of life, you'll agree that no particular harm was done because I did not go further than the 1930s in my Virgin Soil Upturned, but think how terrible it would have been if our agriculture and industry had still remained at the 1930s level!"
He answered it himself. He stopped where he stopped, and he made a joke of it. Yakimenko, writing in Moscow around 1970, said the question could not be answered; the answer had been printed in 1957 and Lukin, in 1973, reprinted it.
The tradition this series writes from had described the machinery in 1936, in the seventh chapter of The Revolution Betrayed. Trotsky's account of Soviet literature under the bureaucracy is exact where it is not sweeping. The principle first: in the hottest years of the civil war it had been clear to the revolution's leaders that a government "could, guided by political considerations, place limitations upon creative freedom, but in no case pretend to the role of commander in the sphere of science, literature and art". Then the mechanism: "In the process of struggle against the party Opposition, the literary schools were strangled one after the other. ... The central organ of the party prints anonymous directive editorials, having the character of military orders, in architecture, literature, dramatic art, the ballet." Then the human consequence, in a sentence that is a map of this book: "Gifted writers who cannot do sufficient violence to themselves are pursued by a pack of instructors armed with shamelessness and dozens of quotations. The most eminent artists either commit suicide, or find their material in the remote past, or become silent."
Fadeyev took the first road. Sholokhov took the second and then the third, and said so out loud in 1957.
Trotsky also wrote, in the same chapter, that "Mediocre but 'right-thinking' storytellers like Serafimovich or Gladkov are inaugurated as classics", and closed it by predicting that the Thermidorian epoch would enter the history of art "pre-eminently as an epoch of mediocrities, laureates and toadies". Serafimovich is one of the two writers this book loves — he was the first to encourage Sholokhov in 1925, wrote the preface to his first collection, and gets a warm and filial birthday tribute here in 1938. And the verdict on the epoch is too broad, as an identical verdict of Trotsky's in 1938 was too broad: And Quiet Flows the Don was written inside that epoch and is not a mediocrity. The point survives the overreach, but the overreach should be admitted. A tradition that applies this standard to Progress Publishers has to apply it at home.
What is this book, then?
It is the record of an accommodation, assembled by an editor who was making a monument and who left the joins visible. Sholokhov did not lie in it very often. He complained about paper, about ministers, about the Azov fisheries, about writers who could not write. He reported a war honestly. He told English readers in 1934 that a writer who varnishes reality is a bad writer, and he was right, and he had already stopped short of the one subject he knew better than anyone alive. Between the letters he sent to Stalin in 1933 and the journalism he published in the same decade there is no overlap at all: the private testimony is a catalogue of starvation and torture, and the public work is a harvest report. He was not silenced. He divided himself, and went on producing at the top of his powers on one side of the division for another five years, and then mostly stopped.
The title Progress chose comes from a speech Lukin quotes in his essay, made to the Second All-Union Congress of Writers: "Our malicious enemies abroad allege that we, Soviet writers, write at the bidding of the Party. The fact of the matter is rather different, since each one of us writes at the bidding of his own heart—and our hearts belong to the Party and the people, whom we serve with our art." Read the whole sentence. The autonomy is asserted in the first half and handed over in the second, in the same breath, without any sense that something has been given away. That is the book, and it is a fair title for it. A writer of the first rank spent forty years explaining that his heart was his own and that it belonged to somebody else, and by 1966 the two propositions had stopped being distinguishable even to him.