Who Wrote 'The Quiet Don?': A Review Article
Under the title Qui a écrit "le Don paisible"? the anonymous French translation of Roj Medvedev's study Zagadki tvorceskoj biografii Mixaila Soloxova (Riddles of Mixail Soloxov's Creative Biography) came out in the summer of 1975…. [It] represents the second major publication on the controversial subject of the authorship of The Quiet Don…. Medvedev is a more thorough, cautious, and impartial investigator…. In the face of all [its] good points, Medvedev's study suffers from a glaring defect: a rather scarce use of materials published during the civil war by the Whites and an absence of reference to White Russian émigré sources. Medvedev obviously had only a very limited access to these sources, without which no serious investigation of the historical background of The Quiet Don can be complete. (p. 293)
Although Medvedev does not claim to have arrived at a definite conclusion, his strong preference for [Fedor Dmitrievic Krjukov (1870–1920)] as the possible author of The Quiet Don is quite obvious, especially since he does not consider any other names and dismisses Solzenicyn's conjecture [see excerpt above] that The Quiet Don might have been the work of an unknown genius who reached his creative peak during the civil war and perished soon after its end….
The reasons for Soloxov's low score in Medvedev's rating are first of all biographical and ideological. The image of the author arising from the pages of The Quiet Don has in Medvedev's eyes little in common with the young Soloxov, a non-Cossack by blood and upbringing who took no part either in World War I or the civil war and who had no chance of knowing intimately the situation in the White camp, especially in its top echelon. Nor could he have created the historical background of The Quiet Don with the aid of printed sources, which were very scarce at the time the first three volumes were being written. Neither, Medvedev points out, had Soloxov exhibited anything but a strong pro-Soviet feeling both in his fiction and topical writings before or after the appearance of The Quiet Don, nor had he created anything approaching the philosophical and artistic level of that novel. (pp. 293-94)
Medvedev repeatedly refers to Soloxov as a member of the Komsomol and puts great weight on the argument that the political sympathies of the author of The Quiet Don could not stem from a person of Communist persuasion. This argument, however, is somewhat weakened by the probability that Soloxov never joined the Komsomol and that three volumes of The Quiet Don had been written before he became a Communist party candidate at the end of 1930. (p. 294)
Soloxov's inability to create The Quiet Don is, according to Medvedev, evident in the unbridgeable philosophical and artistic gap separating that novel from the rest of Soloxov's writings, beginning with volume 1 of Virgin Soil Upturned. In Medvedev's judgment, the narrow class orientation of this work is of a lower moral value than the universal humanism of The Quiet Don…. "The Science of Hatred" is "extremely partial" …, They Fought for Their Country is marked by astounding mediocrity …, "The Fate of a Man" is highly overpraised by Soviet critics to camouflage the paucity of Soloxov's literary production after World War II …, and volume 2 of Virgin Soil Upturned is much weaker than volume 1, and in it Soloxov appears to have lost all his ability to tell the truth to the extent that not a single page of volume 2 is worthy of the author of The Quiet Don…. Soloxov's journalistic writings are for Medvedev "dogmatic and reactionary," displaying a shocking poverty of language and thought…. It is hard to disagree with Medvedev's evaluation of all the above-mentioned works. One can only wish that he had probed deeper into the causes of Soloxov's moral and artistic decline and made allowances for the circumstances under which a Soviet author writes and publishes. It is, for example, very unlikely that the censors would have passed volume 1 of Virgin Soil Upturned had it contained a more detailed description of the tragic conflicts which arose in the early stages of collectivization and which, Medvedev believes, Soloxov treated too hastily…. It would have been impossible to publish "The Science of Hatred" and "The Fate of a Man" had Soloxov, in accordance with Medvedev's wishes, explored in depth the real reasons why millions of Soviet troops were taken prisoner by the Germans…. Although Medvedev seems at times to demand too much from Soloxov and although one can give several reasons for the writer's moral and artistic decline, the fact remains that there is indeed a big difference between the balanced objectivity of The Quiet Don and the heavy ideological slant of nearly all of Soloxov's writings, which generates understandable doubts about the authorship of The Quiet Don. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is that almost three fourths of The Quiet Don was written during the period when Soloxov perhaps was not in a strongly pro-Soviet frame of mind…. [The] principal work of the novel, from the end of 1925 to 1930, was done in a conservative and predominantly anti-Soviet milieu. Besides, this work coincided with the period of NEP when many people, especially such conservative elements as the Cossacks, cherished hopes that the Soviet regime would eventually abandon its Communist dogmas. All this could have weakened Soloxov's original devotion to the Soviet regime. It could also have contributed to the development in The Quiet Don of an objectivity whose elements were already present in some of his stories. With the beginning of collectivization, when there was no middle way to follow, Soloxov sided with the regime and subsequently bound himself to it by joining the Party and by propagating its views in his writings. This could not but seriously impair his objectivity and the artistic quality of his works. Soloxov's moral and artistic degeneration should not necessarily be viewed as evidence that he was not capable of creating The Quiet Don. It can, instead, be regarded as a case of inevitable deterioration of a great talent in the service of a mendacious political power. There can be a variety of reasons why a masterpiece or simply a good literary work is not matched or surpassed by subsequent works, especially in the Soviet conditions after the NEP. (pp. 295-96)
The main difference between Krjukov and the author of The Quiet Don, which Medvedev has failed to comment upon, is the sympathy for the poor and humiliated permeating many of Krjukov's works. This sympathy is expressed at times in a lyrical and sentimental tone, calling to mind Karamzin and the nineteenth-century populists. At the same time the feeling of admiration is conveyed in a lofty and emotional diction. One looks in vain either in Soloxov's stories or in The Quiet Don for passages written in this manner.
Medvedev finds more stylistic differences between Soloxov's stories and The Quiet Don than similarities…. Taken as a whole, Soloxov's stories appear to have more features in common with The Quiet Don than do Krjukov's works…. The Quiet Don shares with Soloxov's stories and Virgin Soil Upturned hundreds of identical or similar figures of speech. The stories, The Quiet Don, and—to a lesser extent—Virgin Soil Upturned contained in their earliest editions a great number of identical or similar blunders of grammatical, semantic, and stylistic nature…. Extensive mishandling of prepositions in the earliest editions of the stories and The Quiet Don [in addition to other errors, is one] evidence of their kinship. Practically all of the cases show an ungrammatical use of one preposition instead of another which can be explained by the influence of the local dialect on a writer with modest formal education. There are about thirty such abnormalities in the stories and about a hundred in The Quiet Don involving over thirty varieties of faulty usage. Many of these varieties appear in both the stories and the novel…. [Note that later volumes] of The Quiet Don had only a few errors involving prepositions because the editors began to catch them in The Quiet Don as early as 1928.
If, in Medvedev's opinion, Soloxov was unable to produce The Quiet Don because it is a masterpiece beyond his artistic reach, one can argue that Krjukov, a well-educated and experienced author, would not have written a work riddled with hundreds of transgressions against literary Russian. To illustrate one more point of similarity between The Quiet Don and Soloxov' works one could list numerous characteristic examples of the rate of recurrence of certain words. (pp. 302-03)
Lack of space prevents me from listing Medvedev's factual errors and inaccuracies. Half a dozen of them are related to history and over thirty to literature, including wrong statements about the time the works were written or published, the time, extent, and nature of political revisions in The Quiet Don, and the details of plots. The most deplorable feature of Qui a écrit is the extraordinarily large number of errors or, possibly, misprints pertaining to publication data and page numbers which appear in the footnotes. More than an average number of misprints occur in transcriptions of Russian words and among faulty translations are the titles of the stories "Rodinka" … and "Sibalkovo semja"….
Although Medvedev has failed to give persuasive evidence that Krjukov is the more likely author of The Quiet Don than Soloxov, he has written an interesting, thought-provoking, and—in certain aspects—pioneering study. One wonders what direction it would have taken had the White émigré sources been available to him. (p. 304)
Herman Ermolaev, "Who Wrote 'The Quiet Don?': A Review Article," in Slavic and East European Journal (© 1976 by AATSEEL of the U.S., Inc.), Vol. 20, No. 3, September, 1976, pp. 293-307.
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