"Stalin’s Scheherazade: An opportunistic literary caper became a lifelong con — with no possibility of escape"

From Longreads, February 6:

Between April of 1926 and September of 1927 Mikhail Sholokhov performed a literary miracle. Never before — and never again — would a similar feat be accomplished. During those incredible months he managed to generate hundreds of typed pages of some of the most engaging prose ever to appear in Russia, a country blessed with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and numerous other gifted writers. On an epic scale he narrated events that occurred in far-flung trenches of World War I, distant centers of power, and revolutionary meetings. He described multiple historical figures he had never met, and he painted vivid verbal pictures of battles that took place when he was still a boy. Brief periods of mad, feverish writing were sandwiched between moves, multiple trips to Moscow to meet with editors, and the birth of his first child.

His literary output during those months exponentially exceeded the accomplishments of his whole career up to that point and most decades of his career afterward. The improvement in quality was incredible. None of his colleagues wept with rapture when they read his early, formulaic, communist short stories. Early editors sometimes had to apply a heavy, corrective hand just to get some of them into print. Suddenly seasoned editors were in awe of his prose. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that this rapid, unexpected literary metamorphosis occurred at the age of twenty-two.

How did he manage to pull off such an improbable literary feat? Some locals insisted that he acquired manuscripts that were left behind when the Cossack side was routed by the Red Army during the civil war. At a minimum the archive he acquired appears to have included an unfinished novel that ended around 1919 and a trove of scrapbooks consisting of stories, sketches, newspaper clippings, and articles spanning over a decade of Cossack history.


His first encounter with the materials he would weave into the fabric of his famous novel can only be imaginatively reconstructed. At first glance such a mélange of materials must have resembled a ragman’s haul rather than a novel. Due to shortages during the civil war Russians resorted to repurposing every imaginable variety of paper. Stories were penned on pages ripped from old school notebooks or under imperial letterheads made obsolete by two revolutions. Memories were scribbled on the backs of long-forgotten proclamations. Missives in minuscule letters snaked across scraps of paper. A closer look at the materials betrayed the signs of a bygone era: the three letters of the Russian alphabet outlawed by Lenin in 1918.

In Moscow, one of Sholokhov’s first editors, Feoktist Berezovskii, became highly skeptical of his rapid metamorphosis. It just seemed too good to be true.

Sholokhov must have experienced both a rush of excitement and a sense of frustration in encountering this treasure trove for the first time. He had to separate out and arrange pages into related groups by handwriting and content. He had to restore sequences and complete scenes which abruptly ended or trailed off without resolution. There were isolated fragments and reminiscences of varying length and quality. From a large pile an irritatingly beautiful story started to emerge. Like the young Michelangelo confronting the Apollo Belvedere, a Roman sculpture of impeccable quality that lost its head and limbs due to mutilation in late antiquity, he had to look past the defects and see the whole in his mind’s eye. Applying imagination to restoration was just a first, tentative step towards intellectual appropriation.

For months he wavered about what to do. Several of his own stories looked juvenile in comparison. Should he just draw inspiration from these materials? Should he mine them for facts? Or could he somehow give them new life? He had read enough philosophy to savor the existential irony of works of beauty lost to the world. At the same time he was pragmatic enough to realize that in its current form nothing from this trove could be publishable in the USSR. As he searched for an answer, the Soviet government offered him solutions. The realms of policy and law unexpectedly spoke to his literary dilemma.

In summer 1925 the government unveiled a dramatic policy shift. The Cossacks would no longer be treated as a hostile, enemy population living under an occupation regime. The regional government determined that “indiscriminately negative” attitudes towards Cossack populations in southern Russia had impeded the growth of the Soviet economy. Many Cossacks believed that vengeance and spite were the driving forces behind Soviet policies. In order to boost the rural economy, local administrations were ordered to actively involve formerly hostile populations in local government. They were instructed to take into consideration Cossack “customs, habits, and traditions.” After this directive Cossack traditions were talked about openly and positively in the Soviet press for the first time. The head of the regional administration even proclaimed that it was wrong to persecute the Cossacks after the civil war.

This was an important signal that it could be lucrative for Sholokhov to truly engage the “big thing” as he sometimes called it. Plans of cashing in on large honoraria and thoughts of hundreds of rubles accumulating page by page appear to have enticed him in the beginning. After working with the “big thing” it became more than a book. It became a mission. From the moment he started to connect narrative threads and patch seams, he shifted from passive consumer to passionate cocreator. He moved, merged, and juxtaposed texts, combining them with new sections drawn from his own background. He added communist threads and amplified communist characters. He wrote new scenes to connect together fragments and to create a grand tapestry. He feared that if something happened to him Quiet Don (often translated into English as Quietly Flows the Don) would “become orphaned.”....

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