A Matter of Plagiarism

When the U.S.S.R.'s most popular novelist, Mikhail Sholokhov, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965, he was acclaimed by the Swedish Academy for "the artistic force and integrity" of his four-part classic The Quiet Don. This week his fellow Nobel prizewinner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, accused Sholokhov of plagiarism in a preface to a critical study of The Quiet Don* published in Paris. Solzhenitsyn declared that the real author of the epic tale of Don Cossacks in World War I and the Russian civil war was Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack writer.

Kryukov is known to have written a massive work entitled The Quiet Don.

Kryukov's manuscript, however, somehow mysteriously disappeared when he died in the civil war in 1920 at the age of 50. Solzhenitsyn believes that Sholokhov obtained Kryukov's manuscript a few years later and passed it off as his own--with some politically necessary but stylistically clumsy modifications.

He theorizes that since Kryukov, a White officer in the civil war, had written sympathetically of the anti-Soviet side, Sholokhov had to insert passages favorable to the Red cause and introduce Bolshevik heroes into the novel.

This, Solzhenitsyn writes, would explain the unevenness of the work.

Solzhenitsyn, now living in exile in Zurich, notes that Sholokhov, a former laborer and clerk with scarcely any education, was only 23 years old when he published the first volume in 1928. Yet, Solzhenitsyn points out, "the book reveals the kind of literary power attainable only after many attempts by an experienced and accomplished writer." He also joins many critics in observing that Sholokhov's other fiction (Seeds of Tomorrow, Harvest on the Don) is strikingly inferior to The Quiet Don, which was completed in 1940. It became the best-selling Soviet novel in the U.S.S.R. (6 million copies translated into 40 different Soviet languages), and Soviet textbooks extol it as the supreme literary accomplishment of Communism. The book continues to be widely read in Soviet schools.

Solzhenitsyn's charge will doubtless prove embarrassing to the leaders in the Kremlin, where the 69-year-old Sholokhov reigns as a court novelist and hatchet man for cultural hardliners. In recent years, Sholokhov has frequently denounced liberal writers; in 1969 he characterized Solzhenitsyn as a "Colorado beetle" who deserved extermination as a noxious plant pest.

Solzhenitsyn's allegation that The Quiet Don is mostly the work of an anti-Communist brings into the open a long-smoldering rumor that Sholokhov is a plagiarist. Reports that Sholokhov had plagiarized the novel were so widespread in 1929 that Pravda threatened to prosecute the "malicious slanderers." When Stalin later declared Sholokhov to be "the great writer of our tune," any discussion of the novel's true authorship became extremely dangerous. But the controversy would not die. In 1967 Russian Poet Andrei Voznesensky publicly recited an unpublished poem in Moscow that clearly alluded to Sholokhov:

You, superclassic and henchman, You ought to be ashamed; You once copied another man's novel, But you couldn't repeat the performance.

Although the evidence is compelling that Sholokhov plagiarized the book that won him laurels both at home and abroad, it is nonetheless circumstantial. Kryukov's manuscript cannot be directly traced to Sholokhov; he claims that his own drafts for The Quiet Don were destroyed during the war. Solzhenitsyn has now appealed to literary scholars and researchers to examine closely The Quiet Don for "unevennesses of style and internal contradictions" that point to dual authorship.

* Published in two parts in English as And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea.

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