Please come downstairs with me through the decades, into a mildewed American basement where hardly anybody goes. The pool table’s cover could use a dusting; ping-pong finds no takers; the fallout shelter now stores tax returns and cleaning supplies; but cheer up: in case dead souls should resume their favourite game, the chessboard remains set for war! Beneath an incandescent light bulb whose yellowish flickers emulate atomic flashes, toy soldiers await tomorrow’s skeleton-commands. With shotgun and shovel, one of Robert A. Heinlein’s encyclopaedia-loving action figures — the eponymous hero of Farnham’s Freehold — defies Moscow’s first strike, while beside him a turquoise-skinned miniature of John Galt, preposterous supergenius of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, rescues the dollar from Communist “altruism”. Across the frontline, way past East Berlin, a pair of tin worker statuettes stand up for Soviet power and against personal happiness — no concessions, comrades! On a steel-cast stallion behind them sits the tallest, saddest, truest chesspiece of all: Grigory Melekhov, fated protagonist of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don.
By my semi-tendentious definition, the Cold War, or at least something cold-ish, began shortly after the Russian Revolution, when Allied interventionists — British, French and Americans — supported “White Guard” anti-Communists in the Civil War, which Lenin won; but his victory was the merest brooding pause. How could there be reconciliation, with our gameboard’s Slavic sector so lurid with starvation, executions, disease? Failing to export Bolshevism to Ukraine and Poland, and suffering economic punishment by the West, Russia postponed “permanent revolution” in favour of “socialism in one country,” and became a fortress besieged. Sooner or later, both sides agreed, the whole world must go capitalist or Red. Against each other they played proxy matches for some 75 years, until the USSR fell in 1991-92. Then we threw a dust cover over everything and went upstairs to start new games.
Shokokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don takes place mostly from 1911 through Tsarism’s trench war suicide of 1914-17 and the resulting fratricide of 1917-20. The book was published in serial form from 1928-40 — at one point Stalin’s permission was required before publication could proceed. At its heart is the fictional (and tragically contested) Don Cossack village of Tatarsky.
Sholokhov, himself, was born in a place like this in 1905. His father was Russian, and his mother a Cossack’s Ukrainian widow. At age 13 the boy became a fighting Red. “Not everyone who lives through terrible times can transform them into art,” remarks his editor-translator, who praises the novel for “a very special authenticity”. And if you would like to know exactly how terrible those times were, let me quantify: during the Civil War, nearly half of the Don region’s inhabitants died, fled or were driven away.
Amidst such duelling mannequins of take-charge citizenship as John Galt and Gladkov’s Comrade Gleb Chumalov (“Comrade Gleb” to his estranged wife) canters bravely brutal Grigory Melekhov, Quiet Flows the Don’s main character. He’s Don Cossack almost through and through; for his grandmother was a Turkish war bride, pregnant with Grigory’s father when the neighbours trampled her to death on suspicion of witchcraft; “and the village acquired its breed of hook-nosed savagely handsome Melekhov Cossacks or, as they were commonly called, ‘Turks.’” 19th century critics might have made much of Grigory’s “mixed blood” when interpreting his personal and political changes of alliance — too many of those to summarise.
For in this truly named “Soviet Gone with the Wind” he will commence a scandalous liaison with Aksinya, the wife of his fellow woman-beater Stepan Astakhov (her charms include a “shift rucked above the knees and her legs, white as birch-bark and parted unashamedly”), before he breaks off with her for a parent-appeasing marriage with Natalya Korshunov, who adores him and whom he pronounces frigid, returns to the irresistible Aksinya. With her he sets up housekeeping in a rich landowner’s employ, gets conscripted into the Great War, “and all of them together, young Cossacks uprooted from their villages, in the atmosphere of death and destruction that followed them, were already wilting and changing like stalks of mown grass” — as Aksinya gets drafted into putting out for the young master of the house — while for Grigory it will be conscription all the way!
See him for instance frogmarched into useless battles, inveigled into Redness until that side’s cruelty makes him defect to the equally slaughter-happy Whites; briefly allured by the idea of a Cossack Republic, not to mention re-conscripted I don’t know how many times — and a stellar fighter he is! — hunted out of his home (“a distant relative of the Melekhovs, a hospitable Cossack, hid Grigory in a stack of dried dung fuel”) and on it goes: pursuing and being chased, promoted, proscribed and simply outlawed… for, by now, he has killed old neighbours, former friends. “Indeed,” says Montaigne, “what are we but sedition and discrepancy?”
From an orthodox Bolshevik standpoint, Grigory therefore deserves a bullet. As for Cossacks in general, well, they were renowned as the Tsar’s cavalrymen, who did great service in 1812 against Napoleon and rode down peaceful demonstrators in the year of Sholokhov’s birth, so why would ruthless Red revolutionaries trust them? Had the frontline not kept jittering back and forth, and had there been less requisition, rape, indoctrination and murderous shattering of families — oh, and had neither dekulakisation nor forced collectivisation impended — the Cossacks might have caused less trouble for their alternating overlords. But Tatarsky, like Aksinya herself, goes on changing occupiers; so that Grigory, who by now would just as soon live quietly with his true love, loses her again and again.
“From an orthodox Bolshevik standpoint, Grigory therefore deserves a bullet.”
I’d hazard he has also lost himself — sedition and discrepancy! One of his White Guard subalterns derides him as “something like a Bolshevik” because he takes umbrage that the officers “look down on you. But from their point of view they’re right… Even though you wear officer’s insignia, you have remained… an uncouth, unpolished Cossack… You blow your nose with the help of two fingers.” — To this he good-humouredly replies: “Just you wait. One day I’ll go over to the Reds, and then I’ll be as sharp as steel… I’ll rip the guts out of you, heart and all!” — So is he inclining Sovietward? Hardly! — “I’ll tell you this, good woman, your son Grigory has turned out to be the worst enemy of Soviet power. When we cross over to that side, he’ll be the first to get a rope round his neck.” The speaker (what a charmer!) then sets fire to seven reactionaries’ houses. “Below him in Tatarsky a sparkling ruddy foxtail was flaring against the slate-black sky.”
In Gladkov’s Cement, which follows the Orthodox line, leading cadres and their non-Party herd must beat off an attack by Cossacks on their cement factory. Comrade Gleb bags one such troublemaker, who turns upon us the “ferocious, bloody eyes of a trapped animal. His eyes were darkened with fear and deadly hatred.” But even Gladkov must allow the Cossacks their courage: the captive “whooped, as the Cossacks do at riding displays,” then jumps over a convenient cliff, because that’s just how they are, you see. 50-odd pages later yet another lot of “bearded Cossacks” will be “coming in a horde, grinning like man-eaters, with whoop and yell and swords empurpled with blood. The Cossack villages would release their thousands to come on across the land like a swarm of locusts…” Somehow they do not sound much like the hard-working, home-loving, insular people described by Sholokhov.
In Quiet Flows the Don, then, Cossacks are grubby, lice-ridden, stingy, greedy, xenophobic, quarrelsome, lustful to the point of rape (Natalya got deflowered by her own father); but unless “mobilised” by Red or White coercion they would rather bring the hay in than “come on across the land like a swarm of locusts.” Here is a certain unwilling locust named Grigory; it is 1914; he has just lanced his first Austrian and sabred his second: “His steps were fettered and heavy, as if an insupportable load had been placed on his shoulders; disgust and bewilderment were crushing his spirit.” Year after year the disgust goes on.
The loved ones fell on all sides, the red Cossack blood flowed, and eyeless in sleep from which there is no awakening, they rotted while the guns thundered their funeral dirge in Austria, in Poland, in Prussia. Even the East Wind could not carry the mourning voices of their wives and children to their ears. The flower of Cossack manhood left its homeland and perished out there amid the slaughter, the lice and the horror.
Menaced for telling the truth in Book III about Red repression of the Don Cossacks, Sholokhov (who I must reiterate was sincerely Red) paused to write Virgin Soil Upturned, a novelistic hosannah to the collectivisation forced on these same people. He may have believed in the activists’ progressive intentions, or hoped to believe, or composed this tale to save himself from the Gulag. Meanwhile he bravely denounced torture and murder where he saw it, and got two of the cruelest cadres arrested. He was then “encouraged” to turn Quiet Flows the Don‘s protagonist into a Red John Galt.
In a personal letter he confided: “I simply cannot make Grigory into a Bolshevik… Let [the bigshot editor] Fadayev… not go on trying to prove to me that ‘the law of artistic production demands such an ending or else the novel will be objectively reactionary.’”
In a private argument with Stalin, Sholokhov courageously insisted that a counterrevolutionary such as General Kornilov could still be “‘subjectively’ honourable when seen as a member of his own class.” It is for this that I favour Quiet Flows the Don above all other Cold War chesspieces; for once we claim that no group who asserts what we despise can possibly be honourable, we make violence against its members less unthinkable. And why? Grigory for his part has no choice but to fight. His “class analysis” is unsteady; you see, he has other interests, such as “the brownish sweat-faded circles under the arms” of Aksinya’s blouse; “his eyes followed every movement.”
How long the discussion continued and how close Sholokhov came to being arrested nobody knows. But Stalin let him have his way.
He finished his masterpiece at the end of 1939, supposedly on Stalin’s birthday. The Nobel Prize came to him in 1965.
In 1969 Pravda declined to continue serialisation of his novel about the Second World War on account of its mention of purges, labour camps and Stalin’s military mistakes — another reason to honour that brave and honest Communist Mikhail Sholokhov.
And was he brave or honest in denouncing Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich? He did whatever so many cadres did, “taking a stand” against writers in bad odour. This has exactly been remembered to his credit. He might have merely been politically stupid, in company with my American neighbours who declined to see our Iraq War as a crime — for it is easy enough to live with repression when we do not see it, and especially when it is applied to people we have never met. (Quiet Flows the Don achieves much of its tragic power because the killers know their victims personally, as did a certain victim or perpetrator named Sholokhov — who unlike Solzhenitsyn escaped a Gulag sentence.) Anyhow, who won’t be enthused about repression if it accords with our Party line? Quiet Flows the Don does not enthuse. It sees both sides.
He ranted against Pasternak and other dissidents, for which I might call him ignoble, complicit — but how badly was he pressured and how much did he understand in his pampered, drunken old age out there in his Don village? (Steinbeck went from being a champion of Okies to a supporter of the Vietnam War. Heinlein was a former socialist who campaigned for the Right-winger Bob Dole.) Sholokhov took a stand, made enemies and was accused of toadyism. But was he a toady of the Whites, the Soviet establishment, neither or both?
“Quiet Flows the Don does not enthuse. It sees both sides.”
He got smeared for plagiarism — first by Stalinists for whom Grigory was insufficiently Red (had some reactionary militarist written this trash?), later by supporters of the intellectuals to whose persecution he gave public approval. In Ukraine, thanks to Putin’s continuing rape of that country, every Russian cultural figure from Solzhenitsyn to Pushkin to Tschaikovsky is officially malodorous, so I was hardly surprised when an amateur literary historian assured me that Sholokhov was not only a plagiarist but also that his great work was no better than wastepaper.
A professional literary expert then explained that he could not have written Quiet Flows the Don; her candidate for authorship was Andrey Platonov, whose work I know well enough to love. To my mind it is far too dreamlike and formally inventive to be Sholokhovian. Well, well. It makes sense that Ukrainians would despise a Stalinist whose masterpiece was composed even as Stalin deliberately starved to death Ukrainian peasants by the millions. And so Stalinists and anti-Stalinists alike go on calling this great author a literary thief, although no one has proven any such thing.
Now that all the authors mentioned in this essay are dead, what most matters about them is what they wrote.
Ostrovsky’s novel, like its Soviet cause, has decomposed nearly to irrelevance. Gladkov could write well enough. His portraits of hard-charging Communists in Cement make the mentality of that time vivid, comprehensible and even estimable whenever it is not abhorrent. Some of Heinlein’s science fictions are still ideologically coherent, but dating rapidly. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged retains its followers, some of whom just got their man back into the White House. Its mild racism, patriarchal gender norms, exaltation of luxury-loving tycoons and contempt for the poor remain in favour here in the United States.
Of all these, Quiet Flows the Don is the most alive. Like them, it is a political screed, an entertainment and a moving (horribly sad) depiction of people trying to survive within a whirlwind they barely understand. Yet unlike them, in its combination of specificity and universality, its unsentimental compassion and brilliant verisimilitude, the book deserves comparison with its sunnier cousin War and Peace.
