10 December

Mikhail Sholokhov collects his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm: how an apparatchik became an unperson

1965 The Nobel for Literature has frequently proved controversial, for which read curious, at best. So many criteria, whether diplomatic, political or whatever, have to be considered along with literary quality that the judges’ choice often diverges from that of posterity.

Among those never awarded the prize were Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Emile Zola, Franz Kafka, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Mailer. Meanwhile, the winners included Henryk Sienkiewicz, Romain Rolland, Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Harry Martinson and Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf.

Is Sholokhov another of those now forgotten literary laureates? Yes, but not because of literary quality. His And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), an epic sweep across Russian life during a time of fundamental change, has often been compared to War and Peace – with some claim to justice.

The book has also been cited repeatedly as a masterpiece of Soviet realism, which isn’t the same kind of praise, of course, but at least meant that he wouldn’t lack for home-grown accolades. As well as the Nobel, Sholokhov won the Stalin Prize in 1941, and was much rewarded by the Stalinist state in other ways. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet, to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party, made an Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a Hero of Socialist Labour (twice), and elected Vice President of the Association of Soviet Writers.

As an establishment figure, Sholokhov also seems to have played a dubious role in the country’s cultural struggles. For example, he supported the sentences of seven and five years respectively handed down to dissident writers Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel for ‘anti-Soviet activity’, and approved the persecution of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn himself (Nobel, 1970) in turn accused Sholokhov of plagiarising most of And Quiet Flows the Don. His evidence was circumstantial, but Sholokhov had lost his notes and early drafts, so couldn’t prove his authorship conclusively. In 1984 two Norwegian scholars demonstrated through statistical analyses that Sholokhov was indeed the likely author of the book, and in 1987 the lost notes and drafts – several thousand pages of them – were discovered and authenticated.

But the world didn’t relent: And Quiet Flows the Don has long been out of print. Orlando Figes, in his monumental cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance (2002), devotes not one word to Sholokhov.