The novel “Quiet Don” is the subject of one of the most fierce literary disputes of the last century. Some experts believe that Sholokhov’s authorship is undeniable, others call different names of possible real creators of the novel: Fedor Kryukov, Alexander Serafimovich, Viktor Sevsky. We decided to figure out whether the doubts about Sholokhov are true.

Each year, new articles appear in scientific publications and in Mediadedicated to the question, who wrote the “Quiet Don”. Journalists interview specialists And even Cossacks, regularly conducted "Kryukovsky readings", Whose participants continue to prove that the real author of the novel is not Mikhail Sholokhov, but Fedor Kryukov. Regularly these disputes arise And in social networks.

The question of the authorship of the “Pacific Don” arose almost immediately after the release of the first two volumes of the novel in 1928. In Moscow, and then in the province in literary circles, rumors crawled that a young 23-year-old writer was actually a plagiator. Rumors were becoming more intense, already the general secretary of the Central Committee of Stalin was interested in the People's Commissar of External and domestic trade Anastas Mikoyan, is it so. IN Letter to the wife Sholokhov called this organized bullying and said that he sent a letter to the newspaper Pravda with a request to deal with the slanderers. Rumors were very diverse - the most popular told About a woman who came to the editorial office of Pravda, or directly to the Central Committee, and said that she was the mother of an officer, whose Sholokhov allegedly stole the manuscript.

Maria Ulyanova, who worked in the Pravda’s editorial board, drew attention to the scandal, a special commission took up the affairs of the proposed plagiarism inside the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). March 29, 1929 on Pravda pages A verdict appeared: There can be no question of plagiarism, and all rumors are nothing more than "evil slander." “Every reader, who is not even sophisticated in the literature, who knows earlier works of Sholokhov, can easily notice the stylistic features common to those of his early works and for“ quiet Don ”, the manner of letters, the approach to the image of people,” the RAPP secretariat says, in addition to the head of the RAPP Leopold Averbakh, Alexander Serafimovich and Alexander. Fadeev.

This scandal was followed by the next. Now Sholokhov was accused of theft of the novel by theatrical critic Sergei Goloushev. In 1930 in bookdedicated to the writer Leonid Andreev, a letter was published in which Goloushev spoke about his “quiet Don”. So he called his travel notes about the Cossacks, which, by the way, Andreev did not publish. In a letter to Serafimovich Sholokhov complainedthat his opponents raised his head again and dissolve rumors that he did not release the third volume due to the inability to independently continue the work of Goloushev. Later it turned out that these notes have already were published In 1917, under the name “From the Quiet Don” and under the pseudonym “Sergey Glagol”, and Sholokhov’s romance is not at all like Roman. The third one did not come out, as it should letters Sholokhov is relatives, due to ideological amendments that one of the ideologists of RAPP Alexander Fadeev wanted to introduce.

After the release of the rest of the novel, the conversation about the author of the “Quiet Don” changed somewhat. The following version was dominant: someone else wrote the first parts of the novel, and the latter-still Sholokhov. The authors were called different, but as a result, three writers became the main applicants for the creation of a “quiet Don”: Fedor Kryukov, Alexander Serafimovich and Viktor Sevsky. All three - from the Don, were familiar with the Cossack life, and all of them - older than Sholokhov. Fedor Kryukov died (according to another version, was killed, and Sholokhov’s Testye) in 1920. He left behind a significant number of stories about Don and Cossacks. The largest monograph, proving his right to be considered the author of the novel, was written by Irina Medvedeva-Tomashevskaya in 1974. The preface for her book “The Struz of the“ Quiet Don ”” was written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Medvedev Tomashevskaya believed that the first two volumes were completely borrowed from Kryukov. The key textological argument for her was the lack of manuscripts of the first and second volumes (later the manuscripts were found and published). The second version is the authorship of Serafimovich. This, in particular, was written by the Hermitage employee Mikhail Anikin. He investigated The similarity of the style of two writers came to the conclusion that Serafimovich wrote all the works of Sholokhov. Finally, philologist Zeev Bar-Sella defends The version of the authorship of Viktor Sevsky - another native of the Don, who died in 1920. In his opinion, the manuscripts of Sevsky fell into the Cheka and were subsequently published under the name Sholokhov. Speech, again, is about the first half of the epic.

By the end of the 20th century, mathematical methods began to be used to determine the authorship of the “quiet Don”. Moreover, the results were very different. For example, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences Andrei Zenkov I tried it On Sholokhov’s works, the statistical method of style. Based on the frequency of use of numerals in the texts, he determined the style of unity. As a result, Zenkov came to the conclusion that Sholokhov wrote “Quiet Don”. In the 1970s, a group of scientists from Norway and Sweden (Heir Hires, Sven Gustavsson, Bengt Bekman and Steinar Gil) conducted a comparative study texts of Sholokhov and Kryukov. For analysis, similar fragments were selected, a total of a little less than 150 thousand words. Comparison It was carried out In several parameters: the length of sentences, the order of words in the sentence, the frequency of use of lexemes, the length of the words. As a result, the authors came to the conclusion that the rest of Sholokhov’s works (“Don stories” and “Raised virgin”) in all respects closer to the “Pacific Don” than anything written by Kryukov.

The most complete study was carried out relatively recently. In 2020, Linguists Boris Orekhov (NIU HSE) and Natalya Velikanova (Moscow State University) Applied To determine the authorship of the “quiet Don” to Delta Burrose. This method was proposed in 2002 by American linguist John Burrose. Over the past two decades, the Burrose Delta has established itself as the most accurate tool for measuring the author's style. So, the method allowed To researchers to find that the author of the detectives Robert Galbrait and the creator of Harry Potter Joan Rowling is the same person, even before Rowling herself admitted this.

“This method has a good scientific reputation. It is known that there are some restrictions: it is impossible with its help to attribute any text, it is impossible to compare texts written in different genres, or poems and prose. This method is not omnipotent, but it works well, especially on large volume texts, ”Boris Orekhov explained“ tested ”. For each of the analyzed texts, some specified amount of the most frequency words is taken, and then their frequency is compared (presented as a special measure of Z-score, which makes the difference in the volume of compared texts unimportant for research), summing up the difference (the same delta) for each pair of texts. The formula looks like this:

“Not all words of the text are taken, but only those that are at the very top of the frequency list, ranked from greater to smaller. How many words to take at the same time - the researcher decides, this is configured, since we know exactly who owns some texts. If you take too few or too many words, this can give rise to the wrong settings of our tool. The standard meaning from which begins is 100 words, ”explains Boris Orekhov. “After applying the method, we can build the so -called“ clustering ” - that is, what texts are closer to each other in terms of the final value of the calculations, and which are further from each other. First, we check the tincture on texts, the authorship of which is beyond doubt. If, according to the results, we get that, say, Serafimovich is closer to Bulgakov’s novel than another Bulgakov’s novel, which means that the setting was wrong. Then, having already tuned the research tool, we can engage in club texts (from the Latin “Dubia”, dubious). We look at what distances these texts are obtained. The result of this method It looks like a standings, as in a football championship, when everyone plays with everyone. In this table, we recorded a “account” - that is, the distance on which one text is from another. 0 - this means that we are talking about identical texts. The larger the distance, the stronger the texts differ. ”

Clustering the analyzed texts is better perceived if it is portrayed in the form of a tree. “Where the distance is the least, there are the texts nearby,” explains Boris Orekhov.

For research, the linguists limited the sample only similar in genre and volume by texts created by writers at a time when the Quiet Don was written. Thus, the table fell into: separately all four volumes of the “Pacific Don”, “Don Stories”, “Raised virgin” and “The fate of man”; The main applicants for the role of the author of the epic Fedor Kryukov, Victor Sevsky and Alexander Serafimovich; And also Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrey Platonov, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Leonid Leonov, Alexander Fadeev, Dmitry Furmanov and Vsevolod Ivanov.

Surprises research Not brought. The texts belonging to the pen of one writer were nearby: Bulgakov in one cluster, Platonov in another. Sholokhov’s texts, both tubal and those whose authorship was not in doubt are also close to each other. “Don stories”, as can be seen from the schedule, are in the same cluster as all four parts of the “quiet Don”, and the works of Kryukov are grouped in another. “If someone writes, for example, under a pseudonym, then a completely different picture is obtained,” Boris Orekhov comments on his research “tested”. “The confusion comes out: the author under the pseudonym wedges between the texts. Conventionally, we would see Sholokhov on the schedule-then someone else-then again Sholokhov. This does not happen here. ”

More modern research methods, access to the digitized body of texts, as well as the found and published drafts of the first parts of the “Quiet Don” allow scientists to confidently conclude that Sholokhov’s works, from the early to later ones, are written by one person.

The image on the cover: Wikipedia.