Dour Sholokhov
Gibian, George
Dour Sholokhov Harvest on the Don, by Mikhail Sholokhov. Knopf. 367 pp. $5. Reviewed by George Gibian Two years ago a French journalist questioned Mikhail Sholokhov about his reputation as a...
...Well, that's our life, boys, that's the way things go...
...Davidov has shaken off Lushka Nagulnova, the seductive slut, and has become engaged to a virginal girl...
...The story of the conspiracy is told intermittently...
...But the whole basis for the conjectures may have been spurious...
...Reviewed by George Gibian Two years ago a French journalist questioned Mikhail Sholokhov about his reputation as a very slow writer...
...One thing which is certain about the second volume, Harvest on the Don, is that it completes the action with a vengeance...
...In the village of Gremyachy Log, Soviet power and collective farming are firmly enthroned...
...He dies a triumphant hero, a Soviet martyr...
...It is evident that Sholokhov shares the feelings of his character Razmiotnov, who says: "I felt a touch of regret for the old Lushka, young, smart with her tongue, and beautiful...
...Unlike some other recent Soviet books, Harvest on the Don ends with a complete victory of the Communist cause...
...He still has an ear alert to the strong speech of Cossack peasants, a heart attuned to their primitive, earthy passions, and a mind obsessed by the horrible, fascinating enormities of all the beating, killing, conspiring, and seducing which his blood-soaked homeland has witnessed during a century which in its dawn considered itself an age of civilization...
...The novel describes the noble efforts of some Communists, the excesses of others, the recalcitrance of peasants, and the amatory involvements of Davidov...
...Davidov is not arrested...
...For all the horror, the bloodshed, for all the resistance to Communism and collectivization offered, as Sholokhov sees it, by human greed and blindness, the old days were the time when human experience was vivid...
...True, Davidov dies...
...It is a novel with several subplots, lacking a main plot...
...Yet the ending is quite the opposite of a defeatist, anti-Soviet one...
...Its structure is not terminal, but cyclical...
...The village where he settles harbors underground counterrevolutionaries, against whom Davidov and his allies struggle...
...What more could even a Union of Writers bureaucrat demand...
...It is true they criticized me at the Union of Writers for publishing too seldom, but I don't care...
...The novel proceeds not with a march, nor even with a circular course: it just sputters along...
...The mining engineer on the city's paved streets in modern, industrialized Russia may gain Sholokhov's formal assent (he ends his book with a look forward to the horizons of the future), but not his emotional allegiance...
...Before the book was published in Russia last year, there were reports that Soviet authorities disapproved of the ending, in which, it was said, Davidov would be arrested and would commit suicide in prison...
...It brings all the main lines of development of the first volume to an end with such finality that nothing demands to be continued...
...I write slowly...
...Despite all this, Sholokhov's rich, fully engaged genius fortunately does come to the surface...
...It ends almost as it began, with a revival of the anti-Bolshevik conspiracy...
...The siren, Lushka Nagulnova, in the end marries a mining engineer and climbs into the new Soviet technocratic bourgeoisie...
...Seeds of Tomorrow, as its first part is called in English, was written by Sholokhov as a digression during his composition of the sprawling epic, The Quiet Don...
...That he has given, irrevocably, to the pre-indus-trial days, of which we catch a glimpse, here and there, through the flashbacks and reminiscences of the Harvest on the Don...
...The best parts of the book, which are as good as anything in The Quiet Don, are those reminiscences and interpolated tales in which Sholokhov deals with events of the past (particularly the Civil War), tales of violence and torment, human suffering and exaltation...
...This is a robust book, but an uneven one...
...For chapters on end, it is submerged under scenes describing agricultural problem-solving and Party meetings considering new applications for membership...
...The lag between the first (1932) and the second (1959) volumes of the book known in Russian as Virgin Soil Upturned may set some kind of record of slowness in completing a novel...
...It is difficult to imagine how any set of officials could succeed in making the dour Cossack celebrity write or do anything against his wishes...
...Now you might almost say I'd seen her in a dream a long, long time ago, once upon a time, so to speak, but never lived with her in the same village...
...The conspiracy is crushed, its leaders are apprehended and confess ignomini-ously...
...There was even the rumor that Khrushchev himself applied pressure to persuade Sholokhov to keep Davidov alive and end the novel more optimistically...
...She has lost her fire, her body, her lust: she has turned them in for respectability and self-satisfied fatness...
...Occasional diversion is provided by comic passages...
...He answered, "You need speed to catch lice, but not to write books...
...Sholokhov, too, seems to yearn for the bad, wild days, which were also the heroic days...
...It describes the experiences of Davidov, a Communist ex-sailor and ex-worker from Leningrad, who has come to the Cossack countryside in order to help in the struggle for collectivization of agriculture...
Vol. 25 • March 1961 • No. 3
