One of the joys of reading is to walk into a bookshop, browse around to look at books (preferably for some hours), and stumble onto a new book that you had not meant to read, and probably did not even know about until you stepped into the bookshop that day. That was the case with me and Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, which I discovered as I was browsing around Kinokuniya in KLCC a few weeks ago.
What caught my eye? Firstly it was the fact that Sholokhov had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965, with this book being his magnum opus. The other was the inevitable blurb on the back cover, comparing the book to Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
So, having finished reading the book, here are some observations and reflections from Sholokhov’s work.
The first is that, sadly, this book is no War and Peace. The comparison is inevitable, I suppose, given that Sholokhov deals with relatively congruent themes of intertwined lives, family drama and love affairs, and how these get strained and tested amidst the horrors and travails of war. But thenceforth the comparison grows thin.
Sholokhov is a capable enough writer, and his love for his native Cossack life shines through at regular moments throughout the novel. He grows especially lyrical when describing the titular Don river, and how it frames and shapes the lives of the novel’s characters. But Sholokhov lacks Tolstoy’s supreme skill and ability as a writer, especially in the ways that Tolstoy draws very accurate psychological portraits of the main characters of his novel. Sholokhov’s characters are believable, and for the most part the very likeable, but lack the realistic depth and psychological heft of Tolstoy’s cast. Also, while parts of the book were given to expositions of Bolshevik ideology, which the reader assumes Sholokhov has deep sympathies, if not allegiance, for, Sholokhov shies away from the essential questions that form, to this reader at least, the core of War and Peace. Gregor Melekhov is an interesting and admirable Cossack protagonist, but he is no Pierre Bezukhov, with the latter’s almost desperate search for existential truth.
The other observation is that, as a paean to Cossack life, the book certainly hits all the right notes. The reader gets a panoramic sense of the daily lives of the Cossacks, deeply religious, very agrarian, and always engaged in hard and strenuous labour. The Cossack is also a famed warrior, and the Cossack cavalryman is a key linchpin of the Russian Army of that era. But what is especially poignant is the way in which the individual characters in the novel convey, through their choices and decisions, the unique way of life of the Cossacks: independent-minded, free-spirited, courageous, democratic, passionate.
The other thing worthwhile noting about the book is that it does not shy away from portraying the horrors and senselessness of war. The fact that Tolstoy took great pains to paint realistic portraits of military action during the Napoleonic invasion of Moscow, especially the battle at Borodino which takes centre stage in the early part of War and Peace, is clear to see. But when the reader steps backwards to survey the novel as a whole, one cannot escape the feeling that for Tolstoy, the war was merely one part of the overall framing of the lives of his characters, especially Bezukhov and his search for universal truth. Whereas for Sholokhov, the war was interesting and worthy of attention, in and of itself. Throughout the novel, we read of various depictions of military action, and the ways in which the principal characters – Gregor Melekhov, Eugene Listnitsky, Ilya Bunchuk and others – are shaped and wounded and transformed by the experience of war. The drama peters off somewhat in the third quarter of the novel, but this is consistent with the chaotic time between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, and the narrative has stayed largely true to the historical drama of the time.
Overall, I enjoyed reading this. A four-star read, and especially recommended as a Deep Cuts selection for readers who have gone through the Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev books, but still crave further exploration of Russian literature.
