Cossack Classic
Gibicm, George
Cossack Classic And Quiet Flows the Don, by Mikhail Sholokhov. Knopf. 554 pp. $5. The Don Flows Home to the Sea, by Mikhail Sholokhov. Knopf. 777 pp. $5.75. Seeds of Tomorrow, by Mikhail...
...But Mishka has no such scruples: without hesitation, he kills the opponents of what he considers the right cause...
...it appeared serially and in four volumes between 1928 and 1940...
...There is in Sholokhov none of the facile, synthetic optimism or the doctrinaire preoccupation with topical themes which invalidate the countless works of Soviet "socialist realism...
...404 pp...
...Although the characters, in comparison with other war novels of this century like Farewell to Arms, Man's Fate, and Man's Hope, lack even a modicum of reflective response to experience, the reader cannot help feeling pity for Sholokhov's brutalized people...
...It seems to this reviewer that in 1960 it is still more ridiculous than it was in 1940 to consider The Quiet Don a work of "socialist realism," as it is officially branded in the U.S.S.R...
...let us not be any more lenient with our own standards...
...Atrocities of the Whites, balancing the cruelties Sholokhov shows to have been perpetrated by the Reds, have been thinned out...
...Most of the characters accept the ubiquitous pain and inhumanity as natural and inevitable...
...Unfortunately, without a warning to the reader, the publishers have reprinted an abridgment, instead of a complete translation...
...The Cossacks do not reason...
...At one point he even intends to save the life of his opposite number, the Communist Mishka Koshevoi...
...the author supplies no commentary on the characters' choices...
...Seeds of Tomorrow deals in a less epic, more compressed fashion with the collectivization of agriculture...
...a continuation of the book recently appeared in Russia...
...But his epic work has broad scope and crude power...
...Striking is the general absence of thought, of any manifestation of the rational side of man...
...It is a pity that nothing in this reprinting of the book indicates that, as David H. Stewart pointed out after a careful collating of the original edition of the translation with the Russian text, entire chapters have been omitted, the text shortened by more than a hundred pages, and passages important to the book's artistic symmetry and thematic completeness silently dropped...
...Reviewed by George Gibian iT^he New printing of Sholokhov's The Quiet Don (in its English version divided into two separate volumes, under two slightly different titles) is an opportunity to reassess the value of the gigantic novel...
...The main hero, Gregor Melekhov, who spends most of the book fighting with the Reds' enemies, does experience a few moments of instinctive compassion...
...The love of Aksinia and Gregor, presented as inevitable, fated, and tinged with sadness, is one of the great love stories of Twentieth Century literature...
...It is to be hoped that this second volume, when Sholokhov completes it, will eventually be translated into English and published uniformly with this edition...
...It was written in 1933...
...The Quiet Don is a book saturated with brutality, torture, lust, bloodshed, and violence...
...Sholokhov took fourteen years to complete the work...
...The immense novel, now officially considered a classic in Russia, tells of the struggles and sufferings of Cossacks from before World War I through the Revolution and the Civil War...
...The re-issue of The Quiet Don is presumably the result of the current boom in translations of Russian novels, caused in part by the success of Doctor Zhivago...
...the Whites and Greens repay them in kind...
...The Reds torture and exterminate the Whites...
...Seeds of Tomorrow, by Mikhail Sholokhov...
...It has become fashionable to scan the history of Soviet literature for works worthy of being compared with Pasternak's novel...
...The same-ness-within-variety of the novel's network of battles, campaigns, and skirmishes is punctuated by more and more brutal descriptions of executions, fighting, copulation...
...Sholokhov's men and women are bodies inured to hardships, admirable in their endurance and strength, depressing in their love of violence and lack of reflection...
...We find in Sholokhov none of the psychological analysis and subtlety of nuance which were the glories of the Nineteenth Century Russian novel...
...We should be indignant if a Soviet publishing house treated an American work in this manner...
...Aksinia, even more than Gregor, carries out the most poignant (although unconscious) protest against, and triumph over, all that makes the life of human beings sad and pathetic...
...With reckless animality and disdain for consequences, it rises above all obstacles...
...It might make more sense to think of both this novel and Doctor Zhivago not as Soviet but pre-Soviet novels: Zhivago as the individualistic, ruminative, anti-historical novel of the pre-1917 Russian intelligentsia, The Quiet Don as a primitive epic of the long-suffering Russian peasantry...
...The new printing of the novel was an opportunity to restore the entire text...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 9
