Stalin’s Scribe offers a very readable, scholarly presentation of the courage and skill Mikhail Sholokhov displayed in completing, A Quiet Flows the Don, known in the Russian as, Quiet Don. Boeck’s book bluntly details the compromises and opportunism that Sholokhov later practiced in order to survive Stalin’s Terror. At the end of the book, Boeck concludes that the terror had scarred Sholokhov permanently. It is offered as a partial explanation for his courageous intervention to save friends against the terror while at the same time denouncing other writers and officials, many of them innocent. Later, even after Stalin's death, the scars from the terror, along with professional jealousy and resentment, prompted Sholokhov to denounce Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn.
Boeck returns multiple times to the accusations of plagiarism made against Sholokhov throughout his life, including accusations made by Solzhynitzyn. He grants Sholokhov a pass for parts of Quiet Don which the author may have taken from anonymous sources. It was Sholokhov’s skill as a writer that molded any lifted sections of other works into a literary narrative, Boeck tells us.
One problem I had with an otherwise good recommendation was Brian J. Boeck’s description of collectivization, 1932-24, which included Ukraine as well as the Don region. Boeck’s description of collectivization reads like a detached technical manual. Primo Levi was able to describe his year at Auschwitz with the detachment of the chemist because he was a prisoner there! In Levi’s hand, such a detached style intensified the horror. Boeck cannot be given the same dispensation, not when one of the greatest genocides by a leader against his own people was being perpetrated. Boeck's detached style in this section of the book calls attention to the author, pushing us outside the narrative -- something no author wants to invite.
Boeck, a scholar, has indexed his book thoroughly -- his footnotes number 41 pages. It takes some skill to bring such a well-researched book to the public free of the caveat that it can be a slog. Boeck's book is hardly that. Note: the library book in my possession spells the author's name, Boeck, not h. Correction of above. ( )