Join us for an evening with Brian Boeck whose book ‘Stalin’s Scribe’ has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2020. Brian will be in conversation with Celestine Bohlen, one of the 2020 Prize judges.
A masterful and definitive biography of one of the most misunderstood and controversial writers in Russian literature.
Mikhail Sholokhov is arguably one of the most contentious recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature in history. As a young man, Sholokhov’s epic novel, Quiet Don, became an unprecedented overnight success.
Stalin’s Scribe is the first biography of a man who was once one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent political figures. Thanks to the opening of Russia’s archives, Brian Boeck discovers that Sholokhov’s official Soviet biography is actually a tangled web of legends, half-truths, and contradictions. Boeck examines the complex connection between an author and a dictator, revealing how a Stalinist courtier became an ideological acrobat and consummate politician in order to stay in favor and remain relevant after the dictator’s death.
Stalin's Scribe is remarkable biography that both reinforces and clashes with our understanding of the Soviet system. It reveals a Sholokhov who is bold, uncompromising, and sympathetic—and reconciles him with the vindictive and mean-spirited man described in so many accounts of late Soviet history.
Shockingly, at the height of the terror, which claimed over a million lives, Sholokhov became a member of the most minuscule subset of the Soviet Union’s population—the handful of individuals whom Stalin personally intervened to save.
Stalin’s Scribe is published by Pegasus.
REVIEWS
“In a provocative and sympathetic new biography, Brian J. Boeck accepts the likelihood of literary genesis emerging from a long-since destroyed set of documents, but he argues that Sholokhov conjured this raw material—sketches, newspaper clippings, letters, notebooks, diary entries and an unfinished novel—into an original work ... Sholokhov in this telling forced his way into literary greatness ... The man from the provinces, who never made Moscow his home, sparked his genius on his own rough stone ... Boeck forces us to reconsider [Sholokov's popular] biography, at least in part, and that is no small achievement.” — The Washington Post
“Mr. Boeck’s biography tries to explain how Sholokhov lost the conscience he once had ... Since Stalin’s Scribe is a 'political biography,' not a literary one, we get no detailed analyses of the literary works, which may puzzle readers who expect the biography of a writer to discuss his writing. In his afterword, Mr. Boeck observes insightfully that faking one’s accomplishments and constructing a false identity were hardly offenses unique to Sholokhov.” — The Wall Street Journal
Brian Boeck holds a PhD in Russian history from Harvard University and has taught Russian and Soviet history for over a decade at DePaul University. He is the author of Imperial Boundaries (Cambridge) and lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Celestine Bohlen is a former foreign correspondent who did three tours in Moscow, once in the 1980s for The Washington Post and twice for the New York Times in the 1990s. She was a columnist for the International New York Times until 2016 where she remains a contributor. She now teaches Journalism at Sciences Po in Paris.
