In the current (April 5, 2019) issue of The Times Literary Supplement is a
review of Brian Boeck's biography of Mikhail Sholokhov. The biography is
entitled Stalin's Scribe. The review was written by Polly Jones.
Years ago I went through a spell of being enraptured by Sholokhov and read
several of his novels, and so when I read Jones statement that Sholokhov
"sustained his official reputation on the basis of a single, if remarkable,
novel, " I had to stop and resort to Amazon to see if Sholokhov had written
other books besides his Nobel Prize winning And Quiet Flows the Don. And
indeed he had, I remember reading And the Don Flows Home to the Sea, Virgin
Soil Upturned, and Harvest on the Don.
I was reading these novels in translation and was apparently uncritical, for
the novels subsequent to And Quiet Flows the Don were considered so inferior
to it that the theory was advanced that Sholokhov must have plagiarized the
former. I was unaware of any of that at the time I read his novels -
probably during the time I was in college. I was also unaware that he was a
friend to Stalin.
A novelist I was enamored with later on and for a longer period of time was
Nikos Kazantzakis. With Sholokhov it was like reading an exciting adventure
story, but Kazantzakis wrote great novels. They exploded in me. That
happened with The Last Temptation of Christ, Freedom and Death, Saint
Francis, and the Greek Passion. The novel most popular in the U.S., Zorba
the Greek, did not impress me. I bought his The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel,
but never finished it and was never as impressed by it as I thought I ought
to be.
His The Last Temptation of Christ, outraged conservative Christians in the
West. I assumed that it also outraged Orthodox Christian's in the East, but
I don't know. If I were going to reread anything by these two novelists, it
would be Freedom and Death and The Greek Passion.
Lawrence
