Mikhail Sholokhov and the allure of fame. . .

 

Stalin’s Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life and Times of Mikail Sholokhov by Brian J Boeck.

 Mikhail Sholokhov's main claim to fame in the west was winning the 1965 Nobel Prize for literature. I don't know if this means anyone in the west actually reads him, but you can find his book(s) in libraries if you look hard enough. He is still mighty popular in Russia, and required reading in a lot of schools. 

I've not read much of his stuff, but his story interests me as much as his stories. I believe that the Portrait of the Artist Under Authoritarianism can teach a lot. So, I dove headlong into Stalin's Scribe by Brian J Boeck. 

Reading Stalin’ Scribe, one thinks of Mikhail Sholokhov with both pity and contempt. Contempt because by the end of his life he gave up any pretence of writing and gave himself over totally to the needs of the regime. Pity though as well, because in Boek’s telling at least, fate really left no other path open to him. Circumstances made the man. If circumstances had been different, so too would have been the man, less famous perhaps, but with his soul intact. There is tragedy here.

 

Sholokhov owes his legacy to a single he wrote early on in life: Quiet Flows the Don. He never wrote anything of consequence after it; most scholars (including Boeck) think it was plagiarized. Stalin though loved the book, and made Sholokhov the literary face of the Worker’s State. He was showered with money, roomy apartments, country dachas, access to exclusive restaurants and fine foreign liquor. On the basis of that book, Sholokhov enjoyed privilege and luxury for the rest of his life.

 

In the early days, he would try to use his influence for good: he got friends out of the Lubianka, and managed to shield his home-village (or was it his adapted home-village? I forget which) from the worst parts of collectivization. As he grew older though, he became shill for the regime, reliably denouncing dissidents on demand, and sucking up to the Party. He churned out sickeningly sychophantic poems and speeches for whoever happened to be at the top, first Stalin, then Khrushchev than Brezhnev. He feuded with Solzhenitsyn. Quiet Flows the Don would win him a Nobel Prize, but it seems pretty clear this was more of a political sop to the USSR, who’d been grumbling that only Russian dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak got the prize.

 

Brian J. Boeck

The Soviet Union could be very generous to writers it found useful. Stalin fancied himself a literati, and paid close attention what was being written. His recommendation could mean a lifetime of luxury for a writer, or imprisonment and execution. Often a combination of all three. He liked Quiet Flows the Don, even if it did humanize the Cossacks more than any good Bolshevik book strictly should have done. His blessing freed Sholokhov from such petty concerns as making a living or staying artistically relevant. Sholokhov got to travel widely and live lavishly off the public purse. But it came at a price.

           

Scrutiny from Stalin tended to be a protracted death sentence. It meant every word and deed was closely watched and anything at all could be a pretext for one’s liquidation. If at first Sholokhov tried to use his influence for good, he did it knowing that with one false move he’d be finished. He walked a razor thin tight-wire, tying to please this most hard to please of masters, outmanoeuvre his rivals and give his enemies no excuse to take him down. He had to second guess every damn thing he said or wrote, all the time never really knowing what was expected of him. There wasn’t a minute of any day that couldn’t be disrupted by a visit from the secret police.

 

Kremlin intrigue was a game few players survived, and yet Sholokhov did. He outlived Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. But the pressure tore him apart inside. He became a raging alcoholic, at one point downing up to three bottles of cognac a day, and would frequently embarrass himself at Party conferences. During his international travels he would be under strict instructions to abstain, so as not to make an ass of himself and his country in front of the foreign press. Once he even missed an important appointment with Stalin by stopping at the bar along the way and never making it out. How he survived that one is a miracle Boek doesn’t get into.

 

Under the circumstances though, one can hardly blame him. It was a nerve shattering existence. If he rarely wrote anything during this time, one has to remember that writing the wrong thing in the USSR could get you killed. Why risk it?

 

Sholokhov stayed alive by learning how the game was played. He realized early on that his survival depended on the good favour of the elite. So when Stalin died, Sholokhov ingratiated himself with Khrushchev, and when Khrushchev died he ingratiated himself with Brezhnev. And when Brezhnev died, Sholokhov himself was just too old for anyone to take notice. He played the game, and he won. His prize was the only one that mattered: he survived. Many in Communist Russia did not.

 

Sholokhov was not a particularly admirable figure. He was not a Pasternak or a Solzhenitsyn. But he wasn’t a Gorky either. He did what he needed to do to survive. If we wish that he hadn’t quite so vigorously supported the powerful against the powerless, or abetted the oppressors against the oppressed, we may ask ourselves if we would have done any better in his situation.