No abstract

The article provides for the first time those reflections on and assessments of M.A. Sholokhov’s personality and literary works which were made by the famous Soviet writer (and the active participant of literary process during the 1930s and 1940s) V.V. Vishnevsky in his diaries. Analyzing V.V. Vishnevsky’s judgments, the article highlights how Sholokhov’s literary works were comprehended — regarding their social and aesthetical value — by the writer’s contemporaries and what characteristics and results this comprehension implied.

The article deals with a wide range of theoretical, historical literary, and source criticism issues related to the theme of Sholokhov’s literary contemporaries; also, the present work provides new archival materials and analyses literary portraits of the writer’s contemporaries as rendered in the Sholokhovian Encyclopedia.

The paper analyses the campaign for art’s national character (which took place in the Soviet Union during the 1930s) so as to present one of the most profound and prolific specialists in folklore, I.I. Kravchenko, who is known as the author of the article Sholokhov and Folklore, a classical philological work dedicated to the writer’s short stories and novels. The article’s text (which was initially published in the “Literary Critic” magazine in 1940) is provided here in its original version: without the lengthy abridgements and corrections made by the editors, but with the improvements inserted by I.I. Kravchenko in his manuscript.

The book contains letters sent from readers to M.A. Sholokhov from 1956 to 1984, and represents a sequel to the 2020 edition containing letters from Sholokhov's readers sent from 1929 to 1955. The collected letters from two archives in the rural locality Vyoshenskaya — the National Sholokhov Museum-Reserve and the Sholokhov family archive — have been published for the first time ever. In addition to presenting the readers' view of the historical and literary developments in the second half of the 20th century, this book also reveals contents of the readers' dialogue with Sholokhov and their attitude to the writer's works and speeches held at the 20th — 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, thereby expanding and deepening our understanding of not only the Soviet Russian literature history but also of the history and culture of 20th century Russia in general. The book is intended for philologists, historians, sociologists, and a broad circle of readers.