“Manuscripts do not burn”: once again about the secret of “Quiet Don”

Don’t think I’m trying to make money. Neither for the last edition, nor for the fifth, about which I spoke with you five years ago, I received no royalties.

What inspires you to get reissues?

– The fight against injustice, versions of plagiarism. I want as many people as possible to know the truth: Mikhail Sholokhov, and no one else, is the author of a brilliant novel.

When did you start wrestling?

– When the Soviet Union was falling apart, not only the hosts of Voice of America and Radio Liberty spoke about the plagiarism of the Quiet Flows the Don, but also writers with names in the USSR. In the almanac “Metropol” Andrey Voznesensky placed an evil quatrain:

Superclassic and satrap,

Be ashamed dear

One novel tore off

Couldn’t get another one…

But the almanac is handmade. It was printed on a typewriter in an insignificant circulation. With the abolition of censorship in the USSR, all and sundry began to talk about imaginary plagiarism. They wrote national newspapers and reputable magazines. Novy Mir, of which Mikhail Sholokhov was a member of the editorial board for many years, published The Tatar Flower, a lengthy work by philologists from Moscow State University, who argued that the novel had several authors, and Sholokhov was the editor …

When in the USSR openly, not in the kitchens, they began to accuse Sholokhov of plagiarism, I decided to follow in his footsteps in Moscow, where he became a writer, to find contemporaries, evidence of authorship.

– Who helped you in the search?

– First I want to name the living Maria Mikhailovna Sholokhova, the daughter of the writer. She gave my seriously ill father my five questions: where, at what addresses he lived in Moscow before the revolution, as a high school student, and after the Civil War, unemployed. I published answers and received letters from Muscovites who knew Misha Sholokhov, who published Don Stories in Youthful Truth and Young Leninist. That was the name of our newspaper, now “MK”.

Unexpectedly met with Yuri Borisovich Lukin, assistant and editor of Sholokhov, he advised to find and meet with “Motya Kudasheva”. So he called the widow of Sholokhov’s best friend Matilda Emelyanovna Kudasheva. “She,” he told me, “may have letters from Sholokhov…”

The meeting with her took place in Ramenki in the spring of 1984. There I saw not only letters, photographs, telegrams from Sholokhov, but also a folder with manuscripts.

I worked on the book for six years. The text, photographs of manuscripts were supplemented by graphological analysis of the Institute of Forensic Examinations of the USSR Ministry of Justice. In May 1990, timed to coincide with the writer’s 85th birthday, he sent a message to TASS about the discovery, published in Moskovskaya Pravda an article “Here it is, the manuscript of the Quiet Don”. Notes about the found manuscripts appeared in MK and other Moscow newspapers, with the exception of Pravda and Izvestia: Sholokhov became a stranger to them.

For five years, not a single well-known Moscow publishing house, not a single thick magazine allowed me to enter the door, even on the Don, which owed a lot to Sholokhov, they rejected the manuscript. The unforgettable Yevgeny Sergeevich Averin, my former colleague in Moskovskaya Pravda, executive secretary and editor of Moskovsky Komsomolets, helped break through the wall. In the newspaper “Book Review”, which Averin edited, in desperation I brought the article “Who will publish my” Quiet Don “?” A large article was published without delay, the director of the new publishing house “Voice” writer Pyotr Aleshkin read it. Warning that he would pay only $ 100, he published the book “Manuscripts do not burn” in 1995 in a circulation of 5000 copies ….

– Is there any mention of everything you said on Wikipedia, are there links to a book that has been published five times, to your publications in MK and other media?

– There are no references to the book. There is only one link to my article in “MK” for 2007. It is mentioned only because in it I name Academician Likhachev, who doubted the authorship of Sholokhov. All.

— How to explain such one-sidedness of the seemingly tolerant World Wide Web. Maybe the editors and compilers of The Quiet Flows the Don Authorship Problem on Wikipedia haven’t read your books and articles in the media?

– The one-sidedness is explained by anti-Sovietism. In addition to the newspapers, two of my articles were published by the journal Questions of Literature, and all philologists, not only in the USSR, read it. The first article was noticed by a professor at Princeton University German Ermolaev, a world-famous expert on Sholokhov. The mail in a torn envelope with US stamps (looking for dollars) delivered his letter to me on a university letterhead with the words: “Thank you very much for the article“ The Quiet Don Manuscript. This is a very valuable and interesting publication, strong evidence of Sholokhov’s authorship.

The letter from England was sent by the translator of The Quiet Flows the Don into English, Professor Brian Murphy. He reviewed the book in the New Slavonic Jornal with the words: “Kolodny inflicted, as the French say, “coup de grace” (that is, the last blow of the executioner, depriving the condemned of life).”

I place this article by the English professor as a preface in the book. It ends, by the way, with references not only to Questions of Literature, but also to all the newspapers that reported the discovery of manuscripts of the novel.

— How is the sixth edition of your book different from the previous five?

— I paid tribute to the grandson of the writer, defended my priority. Therefore, he published a photograph of the former deputy head of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Party, writer Georgy Pryakhin. Academician Frolov, assistant to the General Secretary, met with him on Staraya Square. He also reported on the manuscripts to Mikhail Gorbachev. But he, obviously, then was not up to the Quiet Flows the Don.

The book begins with a preface by Alexander Mikhailovich Sholokhov, the writer’s grandson: “Leo Kolodny’s first information about the search was expanded, supplemented and eventually crowned with a sensational discovery in Moscow of the manuscripts of the first and second books of The Quiet Flows the Don, which were considered lost.”

The second preface is a letter from the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yuri Sergeevich Osipov. “There is no doubt that you were the first to discover the handwritten materials of M.A. Sholokhov, which in itself is already your great merit …”. The recognition of the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences refutes the myth of the director of IMLI, the Institute of World Literature, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences F.F. Kuznetsov, who in 1999 stated that “after many years of searching, the Institute of World Literature managed to find the manuscripts of the first and second books of The Quiet Flows the Don that were considered lost … “. This blunder made its way to Wikipedia.

Why did this statement appear in 1999?

– That year, the Russian Academy of Sciences asked Prime Minister Putin to buy the manuscripts from the heiress “Motya Kudasheva”. The money was given by Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin, who headed Gazprom. (He also later helped to produce a facsimile edition of the manuscripts of The Quiet Flows the Don.)

In the book I give a picture of Mikhail Vasilievich Petelin, the author of the encyclopedia “Sholokhov”, books about the writer he met. Petelin invited me to give a presentation on manuscripts in the conference hall of the Institute of World Literature in 1990.

With great difficulty, the publishing house managed to find a photograph of the head of the department of Soviet literature of the IRLI, the Institute of Russian Literature, Natalia Groznova. In 1990, she invited me to Leningrad to speak at the IRLI in front of teachers of the Russian language. They listened to me in the hall, and nearby the director’s office was occupied by the doubtful Academician Likhachev.

Natalya Groznova reported to Len-TASS: “This find is an event of enormous scale, it is difficult to overestimate it. “Quiet Don” was written by Sholokhov’s hand, for specialists this issue has been irrevocably resolved. To this day, many writers of false versions do not pay attention to this conclusion.

The other day, while browsing the Internet, I found an article “Plagiarism” signed by the writer and scientist Anatoly Shukletsov, who lives in Yekaterinburg. There I unexpectedly read: “Lev Kolodny rendered an invaluable service to the study of Sholokhov, who found the repository of the manuscripts of The Quiet Flows the Don, his first two books.” The study of the pages of the manuscripts, and 646 drafts and white drafts have been preserved, gives the right to say with hope: each of them finally refutes all pseudo-monographs, articles, television appearances of those who tried and continues to try to take away the authorship of the novel “Quiet Flows the Don” from Sholokhov.

With these dear words I want to end our conversation.