It’s the birthday of two Russians who both won the Nobel Prize in Literature but whose lives in the Soviet Union followed very different trajectories: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (1905-1984), a card-carrying Communist (seriously: he joined the Communist Party in 1932 and he meant it so I bet he had a card in his wallet saying so), and Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), who served 18 months in a labor camp and was eventually exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972.

Sholokhov was born in Veshenskaya, Russia, which is Cossack territory, and it is his novels and stories about the Cossacks that earned him his renown, the Nobel Prize in 1965, and eventually accusations of plagiarism—and we’re talking accusations from the likes of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (himself a Nobel Prize winner—of course, Sholokhov had supported the persecution of Solzhenitsyn and just about every other writer in the Soviet Union, so there’s that). Evidently a great disparity exists between the best of Sholokhov’s work and the crappiest, leading to the accusations. The best of his work is his novel Tikhy Don (And Quiet Flows the Don), published in 4 volumes between 1928 and 1940, a sweeping, heroic, epic sort of thing about the Cossacks fighting the Bolsheviks. The novel became the most widely read work of fiction in the Soviet Union. The rest of his work…meh. So Solzhenitsyn and other authors said he stole big buttery handfuls of Tikhy Don from another author, possibly (I know, we’re all thinking it) Fyodor Kryukov, who was himself a Cossack from the Don region. Some Norwegian lit scholars did a statistical analysis of Sholokhov’s work that affirmed that Tikhy Don was probably written by Sholokhov, but even today, some literary folks in the Soviet Union are Just Not Convinced. Sholokhov died in a Cossack village at the age of 78, hated by many both in and out of the Soviet Union for supporting the government and throwing other writers under the proverbial state-run bus.

Then there’s Brodsky. He was born in Leningrad, studied with the poet Anna Akhmatova, and was sentenced to five years’ hard labor for “social parasitism” because the authorities just couldn’t find solid charges based on his poetry, which was not particularly political. Brodsky ultimately only served 18 months. He soldiered on for another seven years; in 1971, he was invited to immigrate to Israel, but didn’t want to leave his home, so the authorities finally invited him right to the airport and put him on a plane to Vienna. W. H. Auden helped him get to the U.S., where he taught at places like the University of Michigan, Smith College, Columbia University, and (for fifteen years) Mount Holyoke College. He also served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1991-1992 and settled in as one of the greatest poets of his generation. He was warm and kind and evidently modest: when he won the Nobel in 1987, he said, “A big step for me, a small step for mankind.” Brodsky had heart problems for years and died of a heart attack at 55 while he was with his wife and daughter.

“Song of Welcome,” Brodsky’s darkly funny poem encompassing the whole of your life and death in a few pithy verses, begins:

 

Here’s your mom, here’s your dad.

Welcome to being their flesh and blood.

Why do you look so sad?

 

Here’s your food, here’s your drink.

Also some thoughts, if you care to think.

Welcome to everything.

 

Here’s your practically clean slate.

Welcome to it, though it’s kind of late.

Welcome at any rate…

 

(Read the entire poem right here.)

Have an excellent Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.