If Sholokhov was not a friend of Stalin, or at least pretended to be (but
given that Stalin was shrewd it was probably sincere) he would not have
published anything in the Soviet Union.
On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 2:57 AM Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
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
