Stalin's Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival, the Life of Mikhail Sholokhov

"In terms of grouping things, the last three books are all biographies , done very differently. In a sense they’re all attempts to understand some of the same things in Russian history and society that Sergei Medvedev talks about. What unites them is that they are about the Soviet experience, but they represent different threads, so to speak, of the Soviet trajectory. Stalin’s Scribe is about Mikhail Sholokhov, the Nobel Prize winner—who is in a very different column from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, another Nobel Prize winner . Sholokhov is a beloved child of the Soviet system, to a degree. An Impeccable Spy is about Richard Sorge, who was a spy for the cause. This Thing of Darkness is about a cinematographer, Sergei Eisenstein and deals with Stalinism and authoritarianism while making a deep dive in the Russian history. With Sholokhov what is interesting is that he’s a man of many mysteries. It’s about the question of lies and fake news, but in a different way than we deal with it now. He’s someone who becomes the ideal Soviet writer. But his official biography has a lot of lacunas. Certain things are hidden, and other things are actually exaggerated and Brian Boeck goes through that. Sholokhov is a man who wrote so much and was politically exceptionally important, but this is the first comprehensive biography about him. It’s a political biography, but not only. There are questions, like whether his best known and most brilliant work, And Quiet Flows the Don , was stolen or not, whether he really wrote it or not, what his relationship with Stalin was. In my reading, it’s about a talent being subdued and corrupted. So a talented person who goes into the service of the Leviathan that Sergei Medvedev writes about. It’s an excellent piece of work by a historian. Boeck goes and consults the archives, some materials for the first time. He was going on an almost yearly basis to the area from which Sholokhov comes, the Rostov-on-Don area in southern Russia. It is not exactly like Sergei Medvedev, but it’s the work of a Western scholar who is really very immersed in his subject and in the psychology of the place that he writes about. He brings so to speak local knowledge and sensibilities to a history of one of the top Soviet intellectuals. I would say that’s right, though Stalin’s tastes changed depending on the politics and political situation. With Sergei Eisenstein, Stalin loved the first part of his film, and then crushed the second part. But yes, in terms of Sholokhov, that would be a fair characterization of him and his relation to Stalin. This is despite the fact that, especially early on, he would write letters to Stalin about the collectivization and the famine that hit the Don region at the time. Stalin considered him important enough to write to him and point out his “mistakes”. This is someone who really had the ear of the dictator. For Brian Boeck it’s not about liking or not liking Sholokhov, the key is understanding him and giving him the benefit of the doubt. At the end of the day, it seems to me that Boeck comes, on the one hand, to a balanced, but on the other hand, a very worrisome verdict not only on Sholokhov, but on the society that created him and that he helped create in turn."