A Man in.War

THE DON FLOWS HOME TO THE SEA--Mikhail Sholokhov--Knopf ($3.50).

Mikhail Sholokhov is a Russian Communist* who is also a Don Cossack--one of the proud, half-savage people who, neither Red nor White, fiercely and hopelessly resisted the Bolsheviks during 1917-21. In And Quiet Flows the Don (TIME, July 2, 1934) Sholokhov marshaled a big cast of Cossacks through the vicissitudes of war and revolution, left them at the brink of civil war. In this, its 777-page sequel, he carries them through that war to its last exhausted gasp in the Bolshevik triumph.

Sholokhov invests his Cossacks with much of that tragic glamor U.S. Northerners feel in the "lost cause" of the Confederacy. This winner's ease of sympathy has a double-edged pathos now that the Muscovite winners stand to lose so much. As a political novel, The Don Flows Home to the Sea has almost ceased to have meaning. Though they are scarcely 20 years gone, its violent events, against the vast implacabilities which devour that same earth now, have the minute, archaic beauty of actions seen through a reversed telescope: Cossack fighting was an affair of horses, hard riding and sabers. But as a plain story of a man, a family, and a people during war, this novel has the high, nerved vividness that such Soviet films as Shors have given to that same passionate, fading scrap of history (see cut).

Chiefly it is the story of the Melekhov family, and of its bravest son, Gregor. Even in his youth, Gregor "soberly and tranquilly" reflected: "I've lived and experienced everything in my day. I've loved women and girls, I've trodden the steppe, I've rejoiced in fatherhood, and I've killed men, have gone myself to face death, and delighted in the blue sky. What new thing can life show me? Nothing! And I can die! It won't be so terrible. I can play at war without risk. I'm not rich, and my loss won't be great."

But life and war prove even worse than his gloomy forebodings. The war turns his father from a strong patriarch to a cowardly, deceitful, heartbroken old man. Gregor's steady mother expires in a moving death scene; his unloved wife, sick with sorrow over Gregor's infidelity, dies of an abortion; his brother Piotra is shot in cold blood by his Red cousin Mishka; his loose sister-in-law Daria, eaten by venereal disease, drowns herself in the Don; his sister Dunia marries Mishka, who becomes one of those insufferably coldhearted bullies who helped keep together--and poison--the post-revolutionary regime.

By the time Gregor is done he has only his young son left on earth, and almost certain death hangs over him. Long before that he has grown sick to death of war, sure he has lost his way beyond any finding.

Gregor is a full-length portrait of an average man in war. He is ably supported by hundreds of sharp details of war, family living, nature, and what female readers like to designate as typically "Russian" scenes: a madly loyal Cossack hanging on to a disabled cannon "like a dangerous pig tied to a log"; Red troops who, with a blaring phonograph on a sledge, gallop round & round the streets of a village; some gruesome close-ups (on both sides) of rape, looting, calm and frantic murder; a soldier trying on some fancy drawers he stole for his wife, catching his big toe in the lace; peasants shyly examining a bullet-pocked plane as it exhales its metal odors in a meadow; a lame, derelict Cossack bandit dancing with his longer leg in a hole; Gregor's dead father, with warlice sheeting his face. . . .

Like most Cossacks, Gregor cared no better for the Whites than for the Reds. What he fought for was land he intensely loved--"We're fighting about it as if it was a woman" -- and that was what he wanted to return to. But by the time his last, hunted scavenging was done, he knew of his people: "Nobody needs us; we're preventing everybody from living and working in peace." There was no return for him, except to face a firing squad.

* Last fortnight he was appointed Moscow correspondent of Overseas News Agency.

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