Word: sholokhov
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
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...
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 In 1967 Russian Poet Andrei Voznesensky publicly recited an unpublished poem in Moscow that clearly alluded to Sholokhov...
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...