Stalin's Scribe
Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov
-
- $29.99
-
- $29.99
Publisher Description
A masterful and definitive biography of one of the most misunderstood and controversial writers in Russian literature.
Mikhail Sholokhov is arguably one of the most contentious recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature in history. As a young man, Sholokhov’s epic novel, Quiet Don, became an unprecedented overnight success.
Stalin’s Scribe is the first biography of a man who was once one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent political figures. Thanks to the opening of Russia’s archives, Brian Boeck discovers that Sholokhov’s official Soviet biography is actually a tangled web of legends, half-truths, and contradictions. Boeck examines the complex connection between an author and a dictator, revealing how a Stalinist courtier became an ideological acrobat and consummate politician in order to stay in favor and remain relevant after the dictator’s death.
Stalin's Scribe is remarkable biography that both reinforces and clashes with our understanding of the Soviet system. It reveals a Sholokhov who is bold, uncompromising, and sympathetic—and reconciles him with the vindictive and mean-spirited man described in so many accounts of late Soviet history.
Shockingly, at the height of the terror, which claimed over a million lives, Sholokhov became a member of the most minuscule subset of the Soviet Union’s population—the handful of individuals whom Stalin personally intervened to save.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boeck (Imperial Boundaries), former professor of Russian and Soviet history at DePaul University, paints a nuanced portrait in this literary biography of a Nobel Prize winning Russian novelist and accused (but exonerated) plagiarist. A "prize prot g " of Josef Stalin, a target of rival novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and called by Salman Rushdie a "patsy of the regime," Sholokhov was a controversial figure of the Soviet era. Boeck vividly relates how Sholokhov, whose fate "hinged on satisfying a dictator's literary cravings," reached success during a time when other Soviet authors were being censored and imprisoned (and accusing Sholokhov of plagiarism); he survived secret police plots to frame him and defended friends wrongly charged as anti-Communists, while writing articles, speeches, plays, and the epic And Quiet Flows the Don. Boeck also depicts Sholokhov's slow and painful fall from grace after Stalin's death in 1953, when "every certainty he had known for two decades had suddenly been thrown into question" and copies of a regime-approved "improved" version of Quiet Don appeared on Soviet bookshelves. Boeck's portrayal of his subject's international ill-fame, habit of hiding his emotions, clashes with Stalin's successor Khrushchev, and drinking bouts make this a deeply engaging take on an important literary figure.
