The second volume of the Sholokhov had been bought about forty-five years before and left on the shelf until a friend’s enthusiastic mention of the book. After at first misguidedly embarking on a reading wrong-way-round, the first volume was eventually found. In the English translation the original Тихий Дон (The Quiet Don) becomes And Quiet Flows the Don, followed by the second part, The Don Flows Home To the Sea (600 & 800 pages respectively).
The first fifty pages of the second volume immediately excited, mostly for the evocative sense of place and the strong Slavic flavouring. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky and Pasternak had not read so thoroughly Slav as Sholokhov in this great historical saga. These Cossacks on their steppe by the river that iced up over winter and slowly cracked open in the spring had a contempt for peasantry who lived without horses and knew only well water. Nonetheless, there was more than enough life in common, even with the Southern Slav kin in the mountains sloping down to the Adriatic.
At the time of the revolution father Lazar was a boy; when the Whites were defeated and Denikin had fled Russia he had become a teenager. Third son, fourth or fifth child of the old patriarch Pavle. In those early teen years he would lose two of the fingers of his right hand to munitions from WWI that were strewn over the hills. Eldest brother Jovan would make a pilgrimage to the statue of Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo and at the end of 1953 Bab would take the train from Zelenika up to Sarajevo, the roundabout and only way to get up to the capital for the train to Greece, boarding at Piraeus for Melbourne. Jovan and Lazar had travelled six years earlier: Naples - Port Said - Melbourne.
The Russian émigré Natalia Borovska had taught Bab in the first grade in the village school, where children brought firewood to class in the morning. Sholokhov mentions Serbia as one of the refuges for the fleeing White Russians.
In this reading there was continual re-translating from the lame English back into what could be confidently guessed as the original.
“…I’m foreign to them from my head to my heel…” / od glave do pete. One of Babi’s common trophes. (“Maturity and good sense needs a long trip from the heel to the head.”)
“Where am I to find her? … I can’t give birth to her” / ne mogu je rodit… (What do you expect, me to birth it?!)
“I don’t know when your telling stories (lies almost certainly) and when you’re telling the truth” / Neznase kad lazes a kad istinu govoris… (By implication a lot of bulldust was being heard, Bab’s rasping note making that clear.)
When a character calls down a heavenly thunderbolt on an antagonist, it could only have been a nebelska strelja, heavenly spear in question.
Terms of affection, terms of cursing and prayer in Sholokhov were perfectly familiar.
Seemingly localised rusticity of Bab’s was here put into the rhetorical mouth of Gregor, the hero of the saga, at a public gathering: “We would all like the wolves to be full and the sheep whole, but…” (Siti vuci, cijela goveda; common in narrative, usually expressing temporary order and balance.) Some of our striking language on Village Uble was cultural inheritance from centuries past.
The old patriarch Pantaleimon, Gregor’s father, in his fit of uncontrollable rage (Vol. II, p. 526) brought to mind old Blagoje Todorov at Ivovici, the husband of incomparable Jelena, first cousin of Grandad Rade. Jelena knitting her husband a sweater was pressing him to try it on, to give his arm or shoulder for measure. It had been untimely; Blagoje was in a foul mood; something was not right. What does Blagoje do when his wife won’t be shaken off? What he does is take the knitting in hand, collect a pair of shears and cut the handiwork into little pieces. There you are then!...
Early in their marriage Pantaleimon had beaten his wife Ilicniya with his hard fists, like other women of Village Uble and of the period generally had been beaten. The husband of one of Lazar’s illicit lovers had been tied to a tree in front of their hut for her beating. Kurva Lazar Pavlova! / Whore of Lazar Pavlov.
Pantaleimon’s eldest son’s playfulness with a nephew would read as cruelty to a contemporary reader. Feeding the young boy sour milk the spoon finds the lad’s chin, cheek and forehead rather than mouth. Mach laughter resulting at the boy’s expense. In the same passage another episode has the lad asking permission to urinate close to the house. No, he must go further off. And then further too. No, further still again. Until to great mirth the boy does it in his pants.
Nothing very exceptional in some forms of upbringing, where a little fun must be devised and cannot be resisted.
Sholokhov’s depiction of deep affection and love is of its own particular kind too, possibly reading rather lamely for some. It is delivered most tellingly in three or four lines in the last section of Volume 2, when Duria tells Aksinia of her brother Gregor’s expected return. Gregor’s wife, who was loved only dutifully, has died; the passionate illicit lover Aksinia has been caring for the children of that union. News of Gregor’s wounding and likely trial before a Soviet Commission, where even a death sentence is possible (despite his subsequent service with the Reds), none of that can prevent Aksinia’s smile at the word of his return. After hearing of it Aksinia escorts Dunia out of the “hut”—there are few houses in this period by the Don—and suddenly snatches up her hand and kisses it. Was she glad at the homecoming, the sister asks in a “broken tone”. Yes, just a little, only a very little, Aksinia answers, “trying to jest, to hide her tears behind a tremulous smile”.
The gruesome, brutal killing in Sholokhov carries echoes of Homer and Shakespeare. Numerous passages make gruelling reading, the last near the end of the book delivering a particularly horrifying example. A Red has pleaded for his life; eventually he made a hopeless run for it and was shot and sabred. Presumed dead, as the body was beginning to be stripped of its jacket and eventually trousers, the killers find the man is in fact still lingering. The scene is brief, the kind of thing that film treatment hopelessly ruins; unfolded here on the page the horror of inhumanity seizes the brain. (749-51)
It turns out biographical evidence suggests Sholokhov was a ruthless Bolshevik, pitiless in his personal judgements. The pity he reserved for his writings.
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