STALIN’S SCRIBE: Literature, Ambition and Survival –
The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov
BRIAN J. BOECK
Pegasus Books, 2019, 388
pages
Review by Phil Shannon
Considering the terrors that
Mikhail Sholokhov lived through, and nearly perished from, in Stalinist Russia,
it is a wonder that the Soviet novelist retained any sense of humour, but he
did. Unrecognised in the exotic shadow
of Nikita Khrushchev, the first post-Stalinist leader of the Soviet Union, during
a 1959 tour of the US, Sholokhov was only paid any real attention once, at a
Hollywood reception, where Charlton Heston announced that he had once read
excerpts from one of Sholokhov’s novels - Sholokhov expressed his gratitude and
quipped that he promised to watch excerpts of Heston’s next movie.
As Brian Boeck, history teacher
at America’s DePaul University, recounts, however, such wry humour was a rarity
in the dangerously fraught life of Sholokhov as he navigated the treacherous
shoals of Stalinist literary culture.
Sholokhov’s detractors claim
that he failed to steer clear of literary shipwreck. He is routinely dismissed by conservatives,
and by many liberals, as just a cultural mouthpiece for Stalinist
totalitarianism - Salman Rushdie, for example, reviled Sholokhov as a ‘patsy of
the regime’.
Yet, there are compelling
exhibits in Sholokhov’s defence. Despite
the attentions of the Censor-in-Chief, Stalin himself, Sholokhov, in his epic Quiet Don, a many-perspectived saga of a
tragic anti-Soviet Cossack rebellion, stuck, for the most part, to his guns.
He could have turned his two main
characters into conventional Stalinist tropes, making the politically wavering Cossack,
Grigorii, a Red Army hero in the end, and his lover, Aksiniia, a decorated
Stalinist milkmaid, but he chose literary integrity over political compliance.
Away from his writing desk, Sholokhov
at times displayed considerable political boldness. As a teenaged Soviet tax collector in the Don
region during the 1921 famine, he falsified tax records to assist starving Cossack
peasants (an act which almost earned Sholokhov a date with a firing squad).
Later, Sholokhov became the
nearest thing to a public ombudsman in Stalin’s Russia, receiving hundreds of
letters a month seeking assistance from the victims of Stalin’s economic and
political policies. Sholokhov took up
the cause of the peasantry who were on the receiving end of ‘rapid
collectivisation’ (a program meant to boost grain exports to finance industrial
modernisation) and who were subjected to savage grain requisitions (flimsily
justified by Stalin as an ‘anti-kulakisation’ drive against rich peasants) when
harvests predictably failed to reach unrealistic quotas. Sholokhov’s pleas to Stalin for emergency
food aid saved the fifty thousand people at risk of famine in Sholokhov’s
district.
Sholokhov also courageously criticised
Stalin’s party purges and the Great Terror of 1936-1938, a program to annihilate
all political opposition to the dictator’s rule, starting with the Trotskyists,
in which a million were murdered. Sholokhov,
cleverly using as leverage a deliberate go-slow on finishing the novel that
Stalin was desperate to see completed, successfully argued the cases of his close
friends and party colleagues who were caught up in the paranoia, resulting in
their release and rehabilitation.
Sholokhov was permitted to thus
act as private critic and advocate only because Stalin cynically valued Sholokhov,
touted by the regime as the Red Tolstoy, for his cultural capital. So, Stalin would defend Sholokhov to preserve
his prize cultural asset, no more so than when the menace of the Terror came
for Sholokhov himself, after Sholokhov had named those in the secret police
(the NKVD) who were responsible for the Terror in his region.
This made Sholokhov some powerful
local enemies. The NKVD tried to implicate
Sholokhov in plots, with Cossacks, to assassinate Stalin and, in league with foreign
intelligence agents, to foment armed uprisings.
Sholokhov got word of this NKVD stitch-up and he grimly awaited his
doom, spiralling into depression and alcohol abuse, and abandoning any further
work on Quiet Don.
An investigator sent by
Stalin reported that Sholokhov was on the verge of suicide. Sholokhov was worth much more to Stalin alive
than as a martyr to the Terror, and so Stalin quashed all allegations against
his treasured writer.
Stalin also came to
Sholokhov’s aid by rescuing his literary reputation. A literary faction (‘Proletkult’) who thought
they were being impeccably Stalinist in accusing Sholokhov of humanism, pacifism,
liberalism and of not being sufficiently oriented to the urban proletariat in
his novels, was also put firmly back in its box by Stalin.
Stalin also ensured that
charges of plagiarism, which jealous rivals had unfairly levied against Sholokhov
from the time he reworked a stash of Cossack memoirs and diaries into his creative
epic, were denounced as fabrications of ‘rotten Trotskyist attempts to
discredit the most significant Soviet writer’.
Only by the top bully in the
schoolyard taking Sholokhov under his protection could all Sholokhov’s lesser bullies
be kept at bay. The quid pro quo, however, was that Sholokhov would be expected to
return political favours to Stalin.
The compromises demanded, and
delivered, were ugly. Sholokhov added a
chapter extolling Stalin’s ‘anti-kulakisation’ program to Quiet Don, and made it the theme of his quickie novel, Virgin Soil Upturned. Sholokhov also reluctantly accepted over a
thousand edits requested by Stalin to Quiet
Don to make it better conform to Stalinist political and literary fashion.
Sholokhov, the public
intellectual, also signed a letter by leading Stalinist writers demanding the
death penalty for eight senior Red Army officers framed in the purges whilst, from
his platform as a member of the Supreme Soviet (Stalin’s sham parliament), he dutifully
intoned that purging ‘a few thousand vile individuals, people who have
prostituted themselves politically, all of that Trotskyite-Zinovievite-Bukharinite
scum’, had been warranted.
Sholokhov’s political obedience
was also reinforced through material means.
There were tangible benefits to being an officially-approved writer in
Stalin's Russia. Politically-licensed writers
made, on average, ten times as much as ordinary workers, with elite writers
such as Sholokhov making 25 times as much from their state salary and private royalties. A gilded cage had its compensations for those
writers trapped in it.
Only after Stalin’s death, in
1953, could Sholokhov spread his wings. Breathing
politically freer air, Sholokhov reinstated Trotsky, a minor character in the early editions of Quiet Don who had been censored out of
the novel by Stalin, whilst undoing all of Stalin’s other edits to the novel.
Sholokhov could now also
denounce the Great Terror as a program of political extermination based on
allegations that were, as he put it, ‘monstrous make-believe and wild
nonsense’.
In 1966, Sholokhov also passionately
raised the issues of deforestation and industrial pollution of Russia’s rivers,
speaking up for, in Boeck’s words, “nature as something more than a resource
for immediate economic exploitation”.
Sholokhov’s “deep Stalinist
programming”, however, was not so easily undone. Whilst he lacerated the mediocre and
unreadable output from the politically-sanctioned 3,773 members of the Writers’
Union whom Sholokhov called ‘dead souls’ luxuriating in their literary sinecures,
he spurned writerly solidarity with jailed dissident writers. He also spoke positively of ‘the unity of
party and literature’, and he was a supportive voice of Moscow’s armed suppression
of the 1956 revolt in Hungary.
Whilst Western
anti-communists put the boot into Sholokhov over these compromises, some
succour was provided by the judging panel for the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1965. Less beholden to anti-communist
Cold War pieties, the Swedish committee recognised the immense pressures facing
Sholokhov, if he wanted to survive as a writer, or at all, to operate under
stern political masters and noted his assertion of literary integrity in
refusing to fully go along with all the political demands made of him in his art.
Sholokhov’s Nobel award honoured
the high literary merit of Sholokhov, his ability to skilfully combine realism,
romance, cliff-hanger plot, psychological depth and political ambiguity. In doing so, they recognised, too, the
Sholokhov who was, like his fictional characters, the flawed hero in his own troubled
life.
