And Quiet Flows the Don

ix, 755 pp. "And Quiet Flows the Don or Quietly Flows the Don (1934) is the first part of the great Don epic written by Mikhail Sholokhov. It originally appeared in serialized form between 1928 and 1940. The English translation of the first half of this monumental work appeared under this title in 1934. The novel is often compared to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Like the Tolstoy novel, And Quiet Flows the Don is an epic picture of Russian life during a time of crisis and examines it through political, military, romantic, and civilian lenses. Many have claimed, most notably Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that Sholokhov plagiarized most of the novel from another author Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and anti-Bolshevik, who died in 1920 of typhoid fever. The main thrust of these critics is that Sholokhov was much too young (mid-twenties) when the opening parts of the book were written and he could not have written such an unbiased account of the Russian Revolution. A statistical analysis by V.P. and T.G. Fomenko also came to the conclusion that the book was plagiarized. Furthermore, Zeev Bar-Sela, believes that although the book was plagiarised, it was plagiarised from a man called Vinyamin Alekseevich Krasnushkin, and not from Kryukov. Critics also pointed out that the first part is better written than the second, but this could be explained by the fact that Sholokhov wrote much of the second part about a year before he started the first. Felix Kuznetsov, in his 2005 study, 'Tikhii Don': Sudba i pravda velikogo romana ('Silent Don': the fate and truth of a great novel), points to that and to the many real-life prototypes for Sholokhov's characters, that he would have known from his youth in Veshenskaya, as evidence of his authorship. Subsequent computer studies done by Geir Kjetsaa in 1984 supported the claim that Sholokov did in fact write And Quiet Flows the Don. Zeev Bar-Sela offers evidence to the contrary in Literary trench. Project 'Writer Sholokhov'. Sholokhov's books subsequent to Quiet Flows the Don are generally considered not to be of the same caliber and are widely criticized; however this is the case with many authors, and is not necessarily evidence of plagiarism." -- Wikipedia