Harvest on the Don

Rating:
Summary: Socialist realism at its worst
Review: I found this account of life on a collective farm totally boring. The only reason I can see for reading it is to experience a good example of what socialist realism can do to writing. The story and characters did not engage my interest. After reading this novel, I felt as bleak as the life it describes.

Rating:
Summary: In the greatest tradition of Russian fiction
Review: This is a sequel of another epic novel, Virgin Soil Upturned. The lowdown about this novel is that the author was the favorite of the Soviet Communist Party (pitted against the likes of other Nobel prize winners Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak) and the subject matter SOUNDS boring: the collectivization of farming among Don Cossacks during the early history of the Soviet era.

But like all other great minds, Sholokhov is an aberration: despite being a true blue card-carrying member of the Central Committee and despite the seemingly boring subject, he is genuinely a first-class talent that to me is truly superior to Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, and approaches the likes of Turgenev and Gogol.

The pacing and humour of his narrative is similar to Dostoevsky -- fast and interesting, unlike Tolstoy who can be boring and didactic. Characterization and local color however is Tolstoyan: you can really recognize even the individual horses and the dogs, and the description of the peasantry and the countryside reminds one of the pastoral passages in Tolstoy.

The gritty and unflinching realism is very honest and peculiarly modern, but always in the best tradition of grand Russian novels: sweeping, panoramic, and places the reader right in the center of the whirlwind of events and emotions.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: This novel is the sequel to "Virgin Soil Upturned", extending the story of collectivisation in the Don community of Gremyachy Log. As in "Virgin Soil Upturned", the chairman of the collective farm, Siemion Davidov, struggles to keep collectivisation on course in the face of the diffident attitudes of many of the workers and outright opposition of counter-revolutionaries.

Sholokhov continues many of the themes he explored in "Virgin Soil Upturned", and the characters are mainly the same. However, I found "Harvest of the Don" a less satisfying read. It's difficult to say why, because all the elements which made "Virgin Soil Upturned" interesting are there in this novel. The main problem, I thought, was that Sholokhov got the mixture of themes wrong, falling into the trap of recounting rural anecdotes and other humerous stories at considerable length. The result is that my attention was diverted from what should have been the main themes of the novel, and I found that the pace of the narrative was very uneven.

I thought that at the end, Sholokhov in part recognised this "fault" by attempting to quicken the pace of the novel and provide a dramatic end. It did not make up for the rest of the writing though. This is a pity - while not actually disliking this novel, I was disappointed.