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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2019
Since the Russian language until lately has been neglected far more than Western European languages, one might expect publishers to exercise more than usual care with translations of Russian works otherwise widely inaccessible. Unfortunately, unusual care was not exercised in the preparation of the English version of Mikhail Sholokhov's Silent Don. Published originally by Putnam and Company in England and reprinted without alteration in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, the novel appeared between 1934 and 1941. (In the Soviet Union it appeared serially and in four separate volumes between 1928 and 1940.) Evidently with the approval of Sholokhov's agents in Moscow, the English editor omitted over a hundred pages of Russian text, altered the sequence of the narrative, and introduced new chapter, section, and paragraph divisions. Presumably this was done with no thought for politics or ideology but solely on the basis of aesthetic or practical considerations, the aim being to make the novel less expensive and to improve it by rejecting superfluous descriptions and characters.
1 All page numbers refer to The Silent Don, trans. Stephen Garry (New York, Knopf, 1946), x vols.
2 Tamara Khmelnitskaia, “Realism of Sholokhov,” Soviet Press Translations, IV, No. 10, 302. Since the war Sholokhov has had a good deal of difficulty over the moral and linguistic “coarseness” in his novels. The critic, Tarasenkov, who was a leading figure in the literary purity campaign of the past few years, advised Sholokhov to “clean up the language of the first two parts of The Silent Don to the very last detail.” He went on to point out that the language of the heroes in the unfinished novel They Fought for Their Country “is soiled with naturalistic turns of phrase… . . The heroes of the novel—Soviet soldiers—fill their speech to excess with long, florid oaths. The novel will gain greatly if before publication, the author will rework those unfortunate chapters.” (An. Tarasenkov, “Za bogatstvo i chistotu russkogo literaturnogo jazyka,” Novyj mir, No. 1, 1952, p. 215..
3 The entire document, of which this was the first paragraph, was deleted from Soviet editions during World War II; it has not yet been restored.
4 In Soviet editions almost all of the various passages dealing with Bunchuk's love for Anna Pagoodka were deleted or modified already by 1935. The very heart of this passionate affair was gutted so that Bunchuk and Anna emerge, not as the dedicated, threedimensional characters which Sholokhov first created, but as unresponsive clods, mechanically fulfilling Party directives.
5 The “revised” Russian edition of the novel (1953), while praised officially and noisily in the Soviet Union (see I. Lezhnev, “O novoj redaktsij Tikhovo dona,” Zvezda, No. la, 1954), may hardly be said to deserve our attention exclusively as literature, though the additions and deletions made in it do provide valuable proofs of the deadly influence of literary politics on art. The numerous linguistic changes which Sholokhov made are, however, important.
