"Quiet Don" is a masterpiece of Soviet writer Sholokhov.
Quiet Don
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (24 May 1905 – 21 February 1984), born in the Don Valley, was a Soviet writer. He was secretary of the Soviet Union of Writers and twice awarded the Order of the Hero of Socialist Labor. In 1928, the first part of "Quiet Don" was published in the Soviet magazine "October", and the young Sholokhov immediately attracted attention at home and abroad, and "Quiet Don" sold even more in Germany than German writer Erich Maria Remarque's "No War on the Western Front". In 1941, "The Quiet Don" won the Stalin Prize in Literature, and in 1965 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Sholokhov
The novel "Quiet Don", conceived by Sholokhov in 1924, began to write in 1928, completed the first three in 1930, and completed the book in 1940, a total of 12 years. The quiet Don River was once praised as an "amazing masterpiece" and "no novel comparable to it has been encountered in the history of Soviet literature". The work is full of the strong rural atmosphere of the Don River Valley. Sholokhov was later awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his epic depiction of the Don River, with the strength and integrity of the artist, of the historically significant aspects of the life of the Russian people."
The Quiet Don is divided into four parts and eight volumes, set in two wars (World War I, the Russian Civil War) and two revolutions (February Revolution, October Revolution). The plot of the novel is the tragic fate of the young Cossack officers Gregory and Axinia and the vicissitudes of the Gregory family in the turbulent years, writing about the brutal killing between the "red" and "white" Cossacks. The third work depicts the rebellion that took place in the Don region between the spring of 1918 and May 1919. Gregory became a rebel figure. The fourth work writes that the Cossack rebellion was put down and Axinia was killed by a stray bullet. In less than five years, Gregory had defected one to the Red Army and the other to the White Army, his hands stained with the blood of both sides, and his contradictions and pain were clearly inseparable from the particular group to which he belonged.
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The novel's protagonist, Gregory, is a Cossack who is different from ordinary officers. The turn of history completely changed the ancient way of life of the Don Cossacks, as well as the life of Gregory. Gregory didn't know whether he should join the red or white camp. With his own efforts, he was promoted from an ordinary soldier to an officer, a general, but his inner position was constantly wandering. He also vacillates between two women: Natalia is Gregory's wife, but Gregory doesn't like her at first. It was only after Natalia gave birth to him Polyusha and Misha that Gregory developed feelings for her; Axinia was indeed Gregory's favorite person. But in that era of upheaval, neither woman, Gregory, could protect her.
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At the end of the novel, Gregory abandons everything and returns to his hometown with his son. The son is all that life has left for him, the only thing he has in touch with the earth.
Who else is the author?
However, such a great work, from the very beginning of its publication, was accompanied by great controversy, and some literary scholars believed that Sholokhov was not the original author of the novel. Here's why:
Sholokhov began writing novels at a very young age. Surprisingly, he was about 22 years old when he started writing The Quiet Don, and he couldn't have written a novel with that much experience and depth, and before writing this novel, he had only published a collection of short stories. Sholokhov would have written his first book so quickly: the first two volumes of the novel in two and a half years. Sholokhov is said to have a very low level of education – he dropped out of school in the fourth grade of junior high school.
Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, also a Nobel Prize winner and author of the Gulag Archipelago, openly accused Sholokhov of plagiarism:
The book has to be polished many times before it can successfully realize its artistic power. The speed of Sholokhov's writing was doubtful: he only began writing this work in 1926, and by 1927 it was sent to the editorial office for publication; It is an incredible genius that the first, second, or even third part of a novel can be written in one year, and only the proletarian censorship authorities can stop this astonishing creative process! But in the next 45 years of Sholokhov, he never wrote a work comparable to "Quiet Don".
Even Stalin's daughter once said that Sholokhov stole the manuscript from a dead White Army officer and turned it into his book. This statement is as follows:
In 1968, a woman in Leningrad revealed to the media that her brother was a White Army officer during the Civil War and had written stories about her combat experiences. Later, her brother was arrested by the authorities. In prison, he feared that his hard work would be lost after death, so he told his fellow inmates in his cell where he hid the manuscript. And Sholokhov was precisely the one who interrogated this cellmate. She learned about this from a letter her brother had left before his execution, and found his original draft, which was basically the same as "Quiet Don", except for the slight differences in the names and dialogues. Because of her advanced age, she decided to do this for her brother before she died, and asked the editor of the publishing house to investigate the matter to find out who the real author was. But the matter ended without a problem.
However, experts on Sholokhov insist that the novel "Quiet Don" was written by Sholokhov himself. After twelve years of searching and discovery, editor Makarov published the book "Unsolved Mysteries and Secrets of the Quiet Don River" to fully answer these questions.
In 1999, experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences discovered the first and second missing manuscripts of "Quiet Don". After handwriting identification, document identification and identification of authenticity - thus confirming that the original author of this novel is indeed Sholokhov. But the manuscript itself does not prove that Sholokhov was the original author.
Fiction manuscripts