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80 Years of Quiet Flows the Don Autograph

As you know, Quiet Flows the Don was written by Mikhail Sholokhov between 1926 and 1940 (vols. 1-3 were written between 1926 and 1928, and the 4th volume was published in 1940). However, throughout his life Sholokhov was plagued by the accusations of plagiarism, mainly because he was very young at the time of composition, and because the narrative had suggested an in-depth awareness of the events and the life experience, which seemed impossible for a 21-year-old.

The first tide of rumours came in 1929, which led Stalin to order a special investigation. The investigation completed, Sholokhov’s authorship was proved and upheld. Since the 1960s, however, there had been many attempts to disprove his authorship, most of them dissatisfactory, since they mostly included the analysis of the printed texts.

Both critique and the defense of Sholokhov’s authorship were jeopardised by the disappearing of the author’s manuscript. His archive was destroyed in a bomb raid during the war, and only the 4th volume has survived. The authographs of the first two volumes, however, were entrusted by Sholokhov to his friend, Vassily Kudashov, who was killed in the war. Since his death, the autograph had been looked after by Kudashov’s widow, who for some reason never disclosed the fact of owning it.

The manuscript was only rescued in 1999, with the help of the Russian Government. The subsequent analysis of the novel has unambiguously proved Sholokhov’s authorship. The manuscript consists of 885 A-4 pages, the writing paper dates back to the 1920s. 605 pages are in the writer’s own hand, and 285 are transcribed by his wife, Maria, and his sisters. The main body of the manuscript is the draft text, which gives a unique opportunity to follow the author’s work on the novel.

What prompted me to write this post, however, is not only the chance to introduce the PDF. copies of the manuscript of this genuine novel. You can browse them here. There is something more symbolic. The date on the top of the first page reads ’15 November 1926′, which makes it (almost) exactly 80 years since Sholokhov had begun to work on Quiet Flows the Don. And whether or not you understand enough Russian to read the text, you can still observe the author’s ‘workshop’ below.

[This post uses the text of the address of Felix Kuznetsov at the 10th Congress of Russian Writers, 1999 (in Russian)].

[Courtesy of the Fundamental Electronic Library].

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