Accusations of Plagiarism
Sholokhov was accused of plagiarizing And Quiet Flows the Don, which made his international reputation. Sholokhov's detractors claimed that it was written by Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and Anti-Bolshevik, who died in 1920.
The claimed evidence was circumstantial: Sholokhov's age at the time of its composition and, in particular, the alleged gulf in quality between his masterpiece and his other works. However, an investigation in the late 1920s upheld Sholokhov's authorship of "Quiet Don" and the allegations were denounced as malicious slander.
The allegations resurfaced in the 1960s with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a notable proponent, possibly in retaliation for Sholokhov's scathing opinion of Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
A 1984 monograph by Geir Kjetsaa and others demonstrated through statistical analyses that Sholokhov was indeed the likely author of Don. And in 1987, several thousand pages of notes and drafts of the work were discovered and authenticated, including chapters excluded from the final draft.
During the Second World War, Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid, and only the fourth volume survived. Sholokhov had his friend Vassily Kudashov, who was killed in the war, look after it. Following Kudashov's death, his widow took possession of the manuscript, but she never disclosed the fact of owning it.
The manuscript was finally found by the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1999 with assistance from the Russian Government.
An analysis of the novel has unambiguously proved Sholokhov's authorship. The writing paper dates back to the 1920s: 605 pages are in Sholokhov's own hand, and 285 are transcribed by his wife Maria and sisters.
Read more about this topic: Mikhail Sholokhov
Famous quotes containing the words accusations and/or plagiarism:
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)