On Brian J. Boeck’s Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov, “Stalin’s Scribe”

The film came to mind as I read one of the more striking scenes in the new biography of controversial Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984), Brian J. Boeck’s Stalin’s Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival. Throughout the 1930s, Sholokhov, the author of the epic novel of Cossack life before and after the Bolshevik Revolution, And Quiet Flows the Don (1928–1940), masterfully navigated his relationship with Stalin, and even wielded it to save thousands of lives in his native Don region during the most disastrous phases of forced agricultural collectivization. The question of how these tentative first steps developed, within a couple of years, into giant strides — the first two volumes of Quiet Don — continues to feed suspicion that Sholokhov plagiarized his novel wholesale, supposedly from an unpublished manuscript by an anti-Bolshevik Cossack named Fyodor Kryukov (1870–1920).

Source: lareviewofbooks.org