authorship controversy

First rumors of Sholokhov's supposed plagiarism appeared in 1928 following the success of the first two volumes of And Quiet Flows the Don: it was speculated that the author stole the manuscript from a dead White Army officer. Sholokhov asked the Pravda newspaper to prove his authorship, submitted his manuscripts of the first three volumes of And Quiet Flows the Don and the plan of the fourth one. In 1929 a special commission was formed that accepted Sholokhov's authorship. In the conclusion signed by four experts, the commission stated that there was no evidence of plagiarism on the one hand, and on the other hand the manuscripts' style was close to that of Sholokhov's previous book, Tales from the Don.

The allegations resurfaced in the 1960s with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a notable proponent, possibly in retaliation for Sholokhov's scathing opinion of Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Several other writers have been proposed as the 'original' author, although Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and Anti-Bolshevik who had died in 1920 has emerged as the leading candidate.

In 1984 Norwegian Slavicist and mathematician Geir Kjetsaa, in a monograph written with three other colleagues, provided statistical analyses of sentence lengths showing that Mikhail Sholokhov was likely the true author of And Quiet Flows the Don.

The debate focused on the published book, because Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid during the Second World War and no manuscript material or drafts were known. 143 pages of the manuscript of the 3rd & 4th books were later found and returned to Sholokhov; since 1975, they have been held by the Pushkin House in St Petersburg. Then, in 1987, several hundred pages of notes and drafts of the work were discovered, including chapters excluded from the final draft. The writing paper dates back to the 1920s: 605 pages are in Sholokhov's own hand, and 285 are transcribed by his wife, Maria, and sisters. Sholokhov had had his friend Vassily Kudashov look after it, and after he was killed at war his widow took possession of the manuscript, but she never disclosed it. The manuscript was finally obtained by the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1999 with assistance from the Russian government.

In 1999 the Russian Academy of Science carried out an analysis of the manuscript and came to the conclusion that And Quiet Flows the Don had been written by Sholokhov himself.A lengthy analysis by Felix Kuznetsov of the creative process visible in the papers provides detailed support for Sholokhov's authorship.

During the 2000s a Russian-Israeli linguist Zeev Bar-Sella once again stated that Sholokhov was not the true author of And Quiet Flows the Don as well as the other works attributed to him. Based on his own textual analysis of the novel he asserts that the manuscripts were written by Sholokhov not earlier than 1929 and names the writer Viktor Sevsky (real name Veniamin Krasnushkin) as the true author.