The silent Don

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Novel in the magazine "Roman-gazeta", 1928

The silent Don ( Russian Тихий Дон) is the main work of the writer Mikhail Scholokhov and one of the most important novels in Soviet literature. Scholochow received the Nobel Prize for Literature for the work in 1965 .

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The First World War , the October Revolution and the subsequent uprising of the whites against the Red Army form the historical background of the novel.

The life story of the Don Cossack Grigori Melechow unfolds before this . In his youth Melechov fell in love with Aksinja, the wife of his neighbor Stepan Astakhov. After he was married to Natalja, he fled with Aksinja, but after she had betrayed him, returned to Natalja and had two children with her. At that time he was already fighting as a soldier in the First World War, which he survived despite being wounded several times. He later joined the Bolsheviks , but left them again after a short time. Melechow longs for a peaceful Cossack life , but is soon overtaken by the war and fights on the side of the whites against the Red Army. Because of his courage and combat experience, he achieved the rank of officer . Melechow, however, cannot identify with the political goals of whites. But he doesn't feel a part of the Reds either. He sits “between two chairs”. After the whites have been destroyed, he has no choice but to serve the reds. He fought briefly on the Polish front .

At that time, after having renewed his relationship with Aksinja, he had already lost his wife Natalja to a failed abortion . His father, sister-in-law, brother Petro and numerous relatives and friends have also died. He is separated from Aksinja again and again, and when he finally returns to her after being expelled from the Red Army, he learns that his mother has also died and that his sister Dunja has married his former boyfriend, the staunch Bolshevik Mikhail . Michail, full of hatred of the whites, forces the former Rittmeister Melechow to answer to the Bolsheviks for his activities in the White Army.

Melechow suspects that this could mean his death and leaves his hometown. With a heavy heart he joins a band of robbers that are soon crushed by squadrons of the Red Army. After hiding on an island, he dared to return home briefly to fetch Aksinja and flee with her. On this escape, however, Aksinja is shot and Grigory Melechov, plagued by the longing for his children, puts down all weapons and returns to his native Khutor .

The end of the novel remains largely open. Melechow finds his son, who tells him that the daughter has died and that the dangerous brother-in-law Mikhail is at the front. Father and son hug each other.

style

The work is considered a classic example of socialist realism . Approaches to avant-garde writing, which can still be seen in the first two books (quotations from reality, unusual metaphors, use of expressions at a low level of language), soon give way to a conservative representation based on the realism of Russian literature of the 19th century. The often abrupt change from calm to accelerated-dramatic presentation, from a tragic to a comic tone, make the novel varied. Scholokhov dispenses with the comments of an omniscient narrator and the inner monologues of his protagonists and presents - often in dialogues and scenic representations - only their actions, which makes moral typification difficult.

Plagiarism allegation

For a long time the authorship of the novel The Silent Don was controversial; It has been widely assumed that Sholokhov plagiarized the text . The impression was reinforced by the fact that Scholokhov did little or nothing to counter the allegations and clarify questions. The following were cited as clues: strong ideological differences between the strictly aligned communist Scholokhov and his text, the relative insignificance of his other, stylistically differing works, the lack of manuscripts for the novel, Scholokhov's refusal to provide sources for his extraordinarily precise historical information, and the existence of an amateur film from 1975, on which it is recorded how Scholokhov, confronted directly with the plagiarism allegations, collapses and says: “Please tell Ataman Glaskow how much I am ashamed. I ask the Cossacks to forgive me. "

As early as 1928, when the first part of Silent Don was published , rumors began to circulate that the work was plagiarized. It seems that these allegations were due to military functionaries who attempted to counter the depiction of the brutal repression of the Cossacks by the Red Army contained in the novel . In 1929, the editorial staff of “Oktober”, in which The Silent Don had appeared for several years, interrupted the publication until the allegations were clarified. This took place in the same year and Pravda called the rumors "malicious slander, spread by enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat".

The allegations were not further published until the Russian historian Roi Medvedev renewed them with the help of new facts in 1966 and drafted the theory of "double authorship". Scholokhov was only responsible for fifteen to twenty percent of the text, based mainly on the fact that Scholokhov, as a 23-year-old, was “too young to have written such a mature work”. These allegations were reinforced by an anonymous pamphlet that appeared in Paris in 1974 with a foreword by Alexander Solzhenitsyn . According to his account, the author of the silent was Don Fyodor Kryukov , a White Guard officer who died in 1920. Since this was politically " persona non grata ", the manuscript, which had come unclearly to the Writers' Union of the Soviet Union, was passed on to Scholokhov as a politically opportune author, who then served as a front man to make the extraordinary work accessible in the Soviet Union do.

In 1982 a computer-aided text analysis by German Yermolajew appeared , but it came to the opposite conclusion and stated that Scholokhov was to be regarded as the only author of the Silent Don ; These results were confirmed in a similar analysis by Geir Kjetsaa in 1984, who concluded that “mathematical statistics allow us to rule out the possibility that Kryukov wrote the novel while Sholokhov cannot be excluded as the author.” Medvedev became In 2005, however, confirmed after a statistical analysis of the text by Anatoly Fomenko.

The discovery of over two thousand manuscript pages from the Silent Don in 1987 strengthened the turning point; a third-party authorship or even a double authorship was hardly suspected afterwards.

In 2006, however, Felix Philipp Ingold was again suspected of fraud . He came to the conclusion that there is now “as good as certain” that it is “a stolen compilation”. Obviously, Scholokhov, “ despite his public glorification as a 'proletarian Tolstoy ', was a poorly well-read, literarily inexperienced author”, who was recruited early by the Soviet secret service GPU and prepared for the role of a great writer and party literary figure . The name Scholochow therefore stands “not for a real author”, but for a “work of anonymous ghostwriters”.

In 2015, the Russian-Israeli literary scholar Zeev Bar-Sella named the writer Wenjamin Krasnuschkin (1891–1920) as the actual author of the novel. He made a name for himself under the pseudonym Viktor Sewski as the innovator of the physiological sketch and fought on the side of the whites until the reds shot him.

Awards

expenditure

  • The silent Don. Volk und Welt publishing house , Berlin 1947
    • Volume 1: The time of the tsars. Translated by Olga Halpern; 425 pages
    • Volume 2: War and Revolution. Translated by Olga Halpern; 456 pages
  • The silent Don. dtv , Munich 1985,
    • Volume 1: 1st and 2nd book translated by Olga Halpern, 661 pages, ISBN 3423013133 .
    • Volume 2: 3rd and 4th book translated by E. Margolis and R. Czora, 850 pages, ISBN 3423013141 .
  • The silent Don. dtv , Munich 2000, ISBN 978-3-423-1-2728-8 .

Film adaptations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kindler literature encyclopedia , sv Tichij Don . Paperback edition, dtv, Munich 1986, vol. 11, p. 9364.
  2. ↑ Quoted from Ota Filip : His scepter reached from the Don to the East River. In: Die Weltwoche, November 1986.
  3. ↑ Pravda of March 29, 1929, p. 4.
  4. ^ Roy Medvedev : Problems in the Literary Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov . Cambridge, 1966.
  5. ↑ Herman Ermolaev: . Mikhail Sholokhov and his kind Princeton in 1982.
  6. ↑ Geir Kjetsaa et al .: The Authorship of "The Quiet Don". Oslo, 1984.
  7. ↑ Anatoly Timofeevich, VP and TG Fomenko: History - Fiction or Science? (2005), pp. 425-444, chapter: The authorial invariant in Russian literary texts. Its application: Who was the real author of the "Quiet Don"?
  8. ↑ See Ulrich M. Schmid: Loud roar about the "Silent Don". In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, April 23, 2005. [1]
  9. ^ Cloned Nobel Prize Winner. An epoch-making fraud - new debates about Mikhail Scholokhov. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , 23 August 2006. [2]
  10. ↑ Зеев Бар-Селла: "Тихий Дон" против Шолохова. В сборнике «Загадки и тайны Тихого Дона». Самара, PS пресс, 1996 с. 122-194. (German: Zeev Bar-Sella: "The silent Don" versus Scholochow. In: Puzzle pieces and secrets of the silent Don. Samara, 1996, pp. 122–194. )
  11. ↑ Kerstin Holm: Nobel Prize for a Plagiarism - The Soviet Union's lust for fame . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . July 31, 2015, ISSN  0174-4909 .
  12. ↑ Kindler literature encyclopedia , sv Tichij Don . Paperback edition, dtv, Munich 1986, vol. 11, p. 9364.