Stalin's Scribe

Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov

By Brian J. Boeck (Pegasus Books)

I can’t imagine a cleverer or more perverse way of presenting “the first political biography” (xi) of Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1975) than as if from the conscience-addled Sholokhov’s perspective. Biographer Brian Boeck quietly flows with how Sholokhov would have seen his fatefully compromised privileged life. The wonder boy who had cranked out, by the age of 26, the first three fat volumes of Тихий Дон, or as it’s usually known in English translation, Quiet Flows the Don, seems, either from a bad conscience or simple alcoholism, to have been drunk much of the last several decades of his life.

As an aspiring 21-year-old fiction writer, Sholokhov plagiarized or, as apologists would have it, borrowed and adapted a treasure-trove of first-hand accounts of the Russian Civil War by Cossack soldiers and officers into his novel. At age 26, when he needed Stalin’s okay to publish the third volume of Quiet Flows the Don, the Supreme Leader himself interrogated him: “‘Why did you represent General Kornilov in such a soft way?’ Stalin demanded. … An honest answer could imperil [Sholokhov’s] literary career. The truth was simple. In a rush to weave together incidents and narratives into a publishable volume, he had relied too heavily upon anti-Soviet sources. … By appropriating speeches and dialogues verbatim, Sholokhov had introduced counterrevolutionary voices into several passages of the novel” (39-40).

Stalin was taken with the bold young man and made Sholokhov one of his prized kept writers. Once permission to publish Volume 3 had been granted, however, Sholokhov began a new period of concentrated dawdling. Despite proddings from Uncle Joe, Sholokhov hesitated, looked for inspiration in the bottom of cognac bottles, and made excuses not only about his difficulties of finishing the concluding fourth volume of Quiet Flows the Don, but of composing a novel that Stalin told him to write about the glories of collectivism.

Boeck repeatedly and rather too sympathetically presents Sholokhov’s tough choices: for example, whether to keep lying or not about the plagiarism; whether or not to support the Great Terror; whether or not to denounce “enemies of the people.” Boeck gets us so accustomed to Sholokhov’s ignoble choices that he even seems to suggest that we ought to give Sholokhov credit when he doesn’t do a wicked thing. In 1962, when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich miraculously caught Khrushchev’s fancy, Sholokhov “did not use his considerable clout to stand in the way of its publication …” (266). What a hero!

There’s no getting around it that Sholokhov was conveniently anti-Semitic when the winds blew that way and predictably drunk or spineless when given opportunities on the world stage to speak truths to lies. One of the richest men in the Soviet Union, Sholokhov “suffered” the life of a movie star; he was free to travel the world scooping up royalties and campaigning for awards. As a member of the Central Committee, Sholokhov slandered and condemned rivals who stepped out of line or made him feel insecure about his literary status. Soviet officials eventually twisted enough arms in Sweden that the Nobel Committee tossed the Literature prize to him in 1965.

Sholokhov was so important to Stalin and to Soviet nostalgia that his drunken faux pas and remarkable lack of production were to be tolerated. He was protected and coddled not just by Stalin but by Khrushchev and Brezhnev too, and now, predictably, by Russia’s mobster president.

Boeck, with all the evidence making his protagonist seem at best pathetic, instead concludes by making a case for admiring the novelist’s ability to survive: “The moral and ethical compromises that Sholokhov made both in his life and in his work were attuned towards survival. He was not the only person in the Soviet Union in the 1920s whose ambitions initially exceeded his abilities. … By the time his skills developed to match his ambition, the purges were approaching. It took all of his talents to survive and free his friends. His confident self-promotion and stubborn self-defense strategies worked. He played his role so successfully that he was never exposed. He gamed the most important mark in the Soviet Union” (338). Boeck, a professor of history at DePaul, is one of those folks who is charmed by con men even when the con’s been exposed.

Are we really supposed to admire Sholokhov for saving a few pals while crowing the guilt of countless other “enemies”? Millions upon millions of innocent people were jailed, sent to the Gulag or died because of the system and the gargoyles that Sholokhov slavishly lauded. What kind of honor is there in survival for survival’s sake?

Stalin’s Scribe is compelling and fascinating, despite itself; that is, despite Boeck’s occasional fabrications of Sholokhov’s conversations and thoughts (or as he would have it, “reconstructions” (348)); despite the fact that the information Boeck provides would devastate the reputation of far greater mortals than Sholokhov; and despite Boeck deciding to bypass almost any mention of Sholokhov’s family life.

A more despicable major literary figure is hard to imagine. In Stalin’s Scribe, Sholokhov is now the anti-hero of a story he was never sober or honest enough to write himself.