The Writings of Scriptor Adorans

Book in the spotlight: Stalin’s Scribe by Brian J. Boeck

Of the five 20th-century Russian writers awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mikhail Sholokhov was the most controversial choice. This is for two reasons. First, Sholokhov’s claim to fame depended entirely on his epic And Quiet Flows the Don, and he would have never been considered by the Swedish Academy if he hadn’t written it. The trouble is that many believed that he had not, in fact, written it. Throughout his life, Sholokhov was dogged by accusations of plagiarism, and to this day scholars disagree about the extent to which sole authorship of the work can be attributed to him. Second, there is the question of politics. No 20th-century Russian writer of any significance was untouched by it; certainly, all the Nobel laureates suffered grievously at its hands. Ivan Bunin, the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize, fled the Soviet state; Joseph Brodsky, the last one to win the prize in the 20th century, was declared a social parasite and eventually deported; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was also deported, after having done time in a gulag; Boris Pasternak was hounded and ostracized by the Soviet authorities, which might have hastened his death. As for Sholokhov, politics made him suffer as well; but he was the only one who allowed himself to be contaminated by it. 

Salman Rushdie once referred to Sholokhov as a patsy of the Soviet regime. Judgments of this sort are problematic, even if Rushdie has the moral pedigree to make them. To be a prominent writer in Stalin’s Russia was to face dilemmas that we cannot fully relate to. In Stalin’s Scribe, Brian J. Boeck, former professor of Russian history at DePaul University, attempts a more balanced approach. If he does not quite succeed, it is the material that is to blame. The well-known adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely applies not only to those who exercise it but also to anyone pulled into its orbit. In the end, in spite of Boeck’s stated objective, the title of his biography of Sholokhov is a judgment too. Man is the sum of the choices he makes, and the epithet “Stalin’s scribe” is a reflection of the choices Sholokhov made. He paid dearly for his privileged relationship with Stalin, and his life serves as an example of the deformation that awaits artists who throw in their lot with malevolent agents of history. 

Sholokhov’s politics is of more than just academic interest. Since the Petrine reforms, if not earlier, Russia has been oscillating between two competing identities: East and West, Muscovy and Europe, oriental despotism and occidental liberalism. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it looked like Western-style liberalism had triumphed in Russia. But the liberal experiment failed. The ideology of the Russian state turned revanchist, and illiberalism has been in the ascendant for years. The conflict between the two opposing identities continues today and is at the heart of Russia’s war against Ukraine. As Boeck writes, in contemporary Russia, Sholokhov is once more a hero. Sholokhov espoused the nationalist, statist conception of the Russian state that underpins the narrative of the current Russian president. Noting that Putin paid a visit to Sholokhov’s home to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Sholokhov’s birth, Boeck calls the writer a “harbinger of today’s Russian nationalism.” If we are to understand the present situation, therefore, we need to study Sholokhov’s life.

Sholokhov was born in 1905 in Veshenskaya, a settlement on the banks of the River Don. His family background is a matter of some uncertainty, and Boeck wastes no time on his early years. We do know that Sholokhov grew up among Cossacks but, not being one himself, never quite belonged. Whatever the impact on his psyche, his status as an outsider supposedly did wonders for And Quiet Flows the Don – assuming that Sholokhov really wrote it. He was still a very young man when he got into serious trouble with the Soviet regime, and it nearly cost him his life. Working as a tax collector during the Russian Civil War, he was accused by the Bolshevik state of having falsified records and sentenced to the death penalty. He would have been shot if his father hadn’t bribed a priest to doctor Sholokhov’s birth records, turning him into a minor. Or so goes the legend. According to Boeck, this was a pivotal moment in Sholokhov’s life, and the future writer would spend the rest of his life paying off his debt to the Soviet state for its act of mercy. 

A few months after this incident, Sholokhov moved to Moscow, joining the legions of aspiring writers trying to catch their big break amid conditions of poverty and squalor. (In his memoir A Novel Without Lies, the Russian writer Anatoly Marienhof describes how, shortly after the Russian Revolution, he and the poet Sergei Yesenin inhabited a room so cold that, with the most chaste of intentions, they hired a poetess to get into their bed, lie there for a while to make the bed warm, and then leave; a few days later, the woman took off in high dudgeon, complaining that she hadn’t signed up to warm a bed for two saints. The story is comical; the living conditions were not.) A latter-day Rastignac, Sholokhov had no education, no money, and no connections. He went through a string of odd jobs before finding something that allowed him to improve his material standing and write in his spare time. Sholokhov’s early short stories were raw; he received some modest encouragement but nothing that augured the dazzling destiny that would soon follow. Then a miracle happened. Sholokhov produced the first volume of And Quiet Flows the Don, a novel chronicling the trials and tribulations of Don Cossacks during the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. (Boeck uses the title Quiet Don, which is the literal translation of the Russian title, but I will stick to the orthodox version.) The work was proclaimed to be a new War and Peace, Russians readers couldn’t get enough of the novel, and a star was born. 

There were dissenting voices. The ideologically vigilant accused the novel of glorifying the Don Cossacks, who were seen as enemies of the Bolshevik state, and there would be other ideologically inspired criticisms in the future. More damningly, some questioned how a twenty-three-year-old with no formal education and minimal life experience could have produced such a masterpiece. It wasn’t long before Sholokhov faced accusations of plagiarism, a charge that would never go away completely. Fortunately for Sholokhov, he soon gained protection in the highest of places. Joseph Stalin took an avid interest in literature and was well read. As a young man, he had dabbled in poetry, forays into art being a recurring theme in the early lives of dictators. But mainly his interest in literature was practical. The “Red Tsar” saw literature as an instrument of politics and propaganda, a way to shape the New Man, and it was only a matter of time before Sholokhov’s novel landed on his desk. He recognized its potential as a political tool, and Sholokhov was assigned a leading role among the “engineers of human souls,” as Stalin infamously called Soviet writers. The relationship that blossomed between the two (if one could call it that – relationships with autocrats are an impossibility) became special indeed. Sholokhov would receive gifts from Stalin; he would show up for meetings with Stalin in a state of inebriation; he would even dare to joke with the man who, in the Soviet realm, ruled over life and death. 

Sholokhov’s access to the Soviet dictator protected him and, to his credit, those on whose behalf he generously interceded. It also made it possible for him to live comfortably. But the patronage had its tariffs and tolls. His physical well-being was affected – to cope with his closeness to Stalin, Sholokhov frequently took to the bottle and developed a drinking problem. More crucially, there was a considerable impact on his creativity. It would take Sholokhov more than a dozen years to finish And Quiet Flows the Don, and the construction of the plot would reflect the vicissitudes of Soviet political life. Parts and heroes were added and removed based on the notoriously unpredictable political weather of Stalin’s Soviet Union. All Soviet writers of note had to tread carefully to avoid being caught in a downpour without an umbrella; as Stalin’s preferred novelist, Sholokhov also needed a waterproof jacket. The Second World War only ratcheted up the pressure – Sholokhov was expected to write the Great Soviet Novel celebrating the Soviet victory over the Nazis, an expectation he never met. To remain in Stalin’s good graces, he had to laud the dictator, and Boeck shows a man who was only too happy to sing for his supper. There is little that is flattering to Sholokhov in his support for Stalinist terror, his incontinent denunciations of the regime’s victims, or in his praise of Stalin as a paragon of “peace, democracy, and liberty for all peoples.”

When Stalin died in 1953, Sholokhov placed an article, mawkishly entitled “Farewell, father,” in the newspaper Pravda. But as the Stalin cult unraveled, it did not take long for Sholokhov to change his tune. He wasted no time in editing his articles and speeches to whitewash his proximity to Stalin, restoring hundreds of fragments to And Quiet Flows the Don. He was soon brownnosing the new General Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, and denouncing the Hungarian Uprising; once Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Sholokhov moved to distance himself from the former Soviet leader. A consummate political chameleon, he always knew which target he was to attack when he mounted the podium at this congress or that, and his oratory was not without consequences. His diatribe against Alexander Fadeev, chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers, possibly contributed to Fadeev’s decision to take his own life; Yekaterina Furtseva, sometime minister of culture, attempted suicide shortly after Sholokhov had criticized her in another speech. In 1965, after much lobbying on the part of Soviet authorities, Sholokhov finally won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not long after that, at some umpteenth Party Congress, Sholokhov denounced as traitors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two Russian writers who had been put on trial for anti-Soviet propaganda. Using the boilerplate language of the Soviet government, he reminisced about a time when such enemies of the regime would have been subjected to a much harsher treatment. This was in character with Sholokhov’s track record, but many among the Russian intelligentsia were appalled all the same. Russian writers were supposed to represent the conscience of the people, defending the oppressed and the downtrodden; Sholokhov’s invective was seen by the liberal-minded as a break with this tradition. Lidya Chukovskaya, the daughter of the famous Russian writer Korney Chukovsky and a literary figure in her own right, penned an open letter to Sholokhov (which of course could not be published anywhere in the Soviet Union and so circulated in the samizdat) in which she prophesied that history would never forgive Sholokhov and that he would be cursed with the worst possible fate that could befall a writer – literary impotence. 

Chukovskaya was right, but artistically Sholokhov may have already been impotent. He had been unable to write anything that could match And Quiet Flows the Don. Worse, ever since the first volume of the epic appeared, he had been haunted by claims and rumors that he was not the real author of the novel. While much of it need not be taken seriously (one man who accused Sholokhov of stealing the manuscript from him was a paranoid schizophrenic), even Sholokhov’s fellow Russian Nobel laureates thought he had plagiarized the work. Solzhenitsyn was willing to put his skepticism down on paper, and he actively worked to prove that the real author of the novel was a Don Cossack writer by the name of Kryukov. In an interview with Tomas Venclova that took place shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the poet Joseph Brodsky opined that the 1965 Nobel laureate ought to have been the real author of And Quiet Flows the Don, who could have been anyone but Sholokhov. Whatever one makes of all this, the question of Sholokhov’s authorship remains unresolved to this day, the current consensus being that there is no consensus. One cannot think of a destiny more cruel for a writer than to have his paternity claims contested, least of all when the contested work is the one that made his name. Although Boeck takes the view that “Sholokhov’s sole authorship of the first volume of Quiet Don is highly improbable,” he believes this is of little relevance. Boeck insists that Sholokhov’s feat of having put together various sources to create a major novel was a massive accomplishment, regardless of his intentions. But Boeck also acknowledges that Sholokhov was tormented by doubts about his own artistic potency: “He [Sholokhov] cryptically lamented that he betrayed himself back in the mid-1920s . . . He could no longer picture his life without the twin burdens of borrowed glory, political favor, as well as the ambition that fuelled both.” Sholokhov had made a Faustian bargain, and these rarely pay off. 

Stalin’s Scribe is interesting and accessible, but it is not a scholarly biography. Depending on how much time you care to spend in Sholokhov’s company, this may be a good thing – sometimes a single paragraph has more to say than a treatise. A significant weakness of this book is that one never gets close to the real Sholokhov. Was he a weathervane? Or a man of conviction? Boeck seems unable to decide, and nor is the reader. There is no question that Sholokhov profited handsomely from his chumminess with Soviet leaders (as itemized by Boeck, Sholokhov’s grocery list was composed of products that ordinary Soviet citizens only saw in their dreams, and perhaps not even there), and there is no question that he knew how to react quickly whenever the wind changed. But it won’t do to call Sholokhov ideologically hollow, and Boeck certainly doesn’t. He repeatedly mentions Sholokhov’s conservatism and distrust of liberalism, sentiments that were (and still are) quite widespread in Russia. Like many Soviet people, Sholokhov had an imperialist mindset – not in the way it is understood in the West, where it has become inseparable from colonialism, but in the sense that the Soviet Union was an empire that had a right to integrity, inviolability, and imperial claims. But Sholokhov was more than just a conservative and imperialist. Boeck references a letter that Sholokhov signed in 1978. The letter was addressed to the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and, Boeck writes, “should be viewed as a platform that he [Sholokhov] endorsed rather than his own rhetoric.” But what kind of platform was it? 

The letter claimed that ethnic Russians and their culture, along with the socialist project, were under threat from “enemies of socialism,” who were trying to blacken Russians and prove through cultural works the “national inferiority of the Russian people.” The letter singled out “global Zionism, both foreign and domestic” as the force that spearheaded those efforts. In this context, “Zionism” is synonymous with “Jewry.” Nationalism in Russia has a long tradition of anti-Semitism – though, as recent events show, even a fellow Slavic group can be its victim – but in the Soviet Union nationalists sometimes had to stay in the closet. Nationalist rhetoric was a thorny issue in a country guided by ideals of an international fraternity of all peoples. In fact, Russian nationalism has always been problematic in Russia; the idea of ethnic homogeneity, or of the primacy of any one nation, is hard to sell in a realm with strong traditions of imperialism and universalist messianism – one must choose between an empire and a nation. In the Soviet Union, Russian nationalists close to the power apparatus had to be mindful of the apparatus’s needs. Thus, they often had to resort to euphemisms. The exact choice of the euphemism was dictated by the prevailing requirements of the government. Sometimes “cosmopolitans” (especially “rootless” ones) worked best; at other times, “Zionism” had to be used. Either way, it was obvious who the author of the letter to Brezhnev had in mind. 

But what about Sholokhov, who had signed it? Was the author of And Quiet Flows the Don an anti-Semite? Some believed that he was. In Stalin and the Writers, a meticulously researched four-volume work examining Stalin’s relationship with his prominent “engineers of human souls,” the Russian literary critic Benedikt Sarnov mentions several episodes that, in his opinion, leave no room for ambiguity. Sarnov writes that Sholokhov expressed dismay upon learning that Vasily Grossman (the author of Life and Fate) had been chosen to write about the Battle of Stalingrad, the implication being that a non-Russian could not write about one of the most important battles ever fought by the Russian people, least of all if he was a Jew. On another occasion, Sholokhov showed up at a meeting that included a foreign visitor who was originally from Russia but now lived abroad. The man was sitting in an armchair and did not rise to greet Sholokhov. Put off by the man’s lack of deference, Sholokhov barked at him, causing him to jump up from his seat. Sholokhov concluded with satisfaction that the foreign visitor had not forgotten the Cossack nagaika – a reference both to his ethnicity and the pogroms inflicted upon Jews by Don Cossacks. According to Sarnov, several sources recalled Sholokhov having told the story, and while there were minor variations in the accounts, the main theme was the same. Sarnov also cites a work by a famous Russian painter of nationalist sensibilities who names Sholokhov as a guru for some of the founders of the “Russian version of National Socialism.” 

I am not altogether convinced by Sarnov’s treatment of the question, and his accusations strike me more as smoking guns from weapons that are never discharged. A man’s life is long, and it seems unfair to indict people based on several statements, particularly those open to interpretations. The possibility that Sholokhov was a godfather to notable figures among the Russian far-right is a more serious charge but, despite the symphonic grandeur of his work, Sarnov’s tendency to get carried away hurts his credibility. He calls Sholokhov a nonentity (nichtozhestvo) because he believes that at a certain age people should assume responsibility for their physiognomy, and in Sarnov’s opinion Sholokhov’s was wanting. Such Lavaterian speculations, irrespective of their merit, say more about Sarnov’s animus towards Sholokhov than about anything else, and they do not belong in a serious work of literary criticism. But Boeck does not skirt this topic either, though he downplays it somewhat. Boeck mentions how, at one reception, Sholokhov berated a prominent Soviet writer for focusing on Jewish casualties during the war. Elsewhere, buried in the endnotes, we find out that Grossman complained about Sholokhov’s anti-Semitism in a letter; Boeck notes that the context would suggest Sholokhov had made an offensive remark about the willingness of Jews to fight in the war – a popular trope among Russian anti-Semites. Boeck does not say how Sholokhov, who coveted the Nobel Prize, felt about Boris Pasternak winning it in 1958, but it couldn’t have escaped him that “Soviet ideologues attempted to thwart the Pasternak candidacy” and offered Sholokhov as an alternative by dint of his being a “worthy continuer of great traditions of Russian literature,” just as it could not have escaped anyone in the Soviet Union that Pasternak, though Christian, was born into a Jewish family. Deploring anti-Semitism in Russia, the lamentably neglected writer Friedrich Gorenstein wrote that someone like Brodsky (or Pasternak) could be called a “great Russian poet,” but never a “great poet of the Russian land.” This might seem like a strange game of semantic pirouettes to most Westerners, but in Sholokhov’s world it meant the difference between those who were well suited to write about the Battle of Stalingrad and those who were not, a difference of which Sholokhov, who once called Pasternak an “internal émigré,” was all too aware. Then there is the matter of the letter that Sholokhov signed – the one that “should be viewed as a platform that he endorsed.” 

Does any of this cast a shadow on And Quiet Flows the Don? No – in the hoary debate about the appropriateness of judging works of art based on the moral failings of their creators, I take the side of those who believe that art has a right to autonomy. This applies to Sholokhov as much as to anyone, and perhaps even more so, for there really is a palpable chasm between Sholokhov and his signature work. This is the nub of Sarnov’s argument, however poorly made: it is not that Sholokhov could not have written And Quiet Flows the Don (though Sarnov clearly belongs to the camp of skeptics), but that Sholokhov should not have been the man to write it. Despite its efforts to offer a nuanced portrait of a complex man, Boeck’s Stalin’s Scribe does little to refute Sarnov’s argument.

Stalin’s Scribe is a powerful reminder of what it means to live in a totalitarian society. This sounds hackneyed and banal, but as liberal ideas are in retreat all around the world, including the West, it looks like we need to be reminded. In his thought-provoking The New Leviathans, John Gray quotes a historian of the KGB, who described the former Soviet Union as a “millenarian, security-focused system” without precedent. Indeed. The Soviet state was millenarian because it had jettisoned its Christian faith, replacing it with an ideology. In its deification of Stalin, in its desire to control the image of Soviet citizens even after their death, in its universalism, the Bolshevik state tried to appropriate what could only be claimed by religion. It was a society that had done away with eternal verities and created false idols, with the result that, to quote Boeck, “realism was subordinate to socialism” and truth was a caricature – a situation that, in some respects, resembles our own society. The Soviet state was security-focused because it was a biopolitical state – one that aimed to control the biological life of the citizenry. Its people were reduced to units, and the value of their lives was determined by calculations made by the state. To be a writer meant that one had to be a member of the Union of Soviet Writers, which was very much like what it sounds – the literary equivalent of an industrial complex. As its proud member, Sholokhov had to attend various congresses; at one such event, he was lectured by a farmer on how the plot of his novel ought to unfold – kind of like a lion advising Hemingway on how to write “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The language Sholokhov used to describe “enemies of the state” during his perorations was also biopolitical. In a 1939 speech, he called them “parasites” who were sucking the blood out of the healthy Soviet “organism”; some thirty years later, he referred to dissidents as “Colorado beetles,” comparing them to pests. Boeck writes that “Sholokhov employed the language of revulsion, filth, and contagion that predominated public pronouncements of the era. He embraced the epoch’s expression of political outrage in terms of physical and moral impurity”; by doing that, Sholokhov “was consciously speaking the Stalinist lingo of purification.” He was, in other words, speaking the language of a biopolitical state.

Stalin’s Scribe is also a powerful reminder of what happens to anyone who enters into Faustian bargains with evil. This should be – but sadly never will be – required reading for people who enlist their talents and gifts in the service of those who use their power to prosecute unjust wars and do harm unto others. Boeck concludes his book by writing that Sholokhov’s heroes have once again become highly relevant in Putin’s Russia, and if we are to make sense of them, we must “admit that while western eyes were focused on urban Russians who thought like us, Russia’s flyover regions continued to treasure the humbly stoic, remarkably resilient, and un-repentantly Russian characters brought to life by Stalin’s scribe.” Boeck’s book came out in 2019; more than three years into Russia’s war against Ukraine, as the platform Sholokhov endorsed has asserted itself in its most bellicose manifestation, I wonder if Boeck wouldn’t choose a somewhat different conclusion, were he to write one today.