Mikhail Sholokhov - Accusations of Plagiarism

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.