60
PARTISAN REVIEW
of it; and this quality is the outstanding quality of the Russian
book.
You see a family, and another family, a whole village; you make
excursions into other villages; you see, in the first section, "Peace,"
that
whole barbarous cossack country through which flows the Don, Iovine,
fighting, plowing, gossiping, going to church and to village meetinc.
conscripts manouvering, men climbing in bed with other men's wiva,
rich man, poor man, beggar man, you see it as if you stood on a mountain
top and looked through lenses both magnifying and penetrating upon
the
swarming lives of a race of people. Then, after seeing them under
con–
ditions comparatively static, you see that race in sudden motion, through
war and on into the most radical change a generation has ever known.
Has any recent American done this? I suddenly remember
Evelyn
Scott's,
The Wave.
an ambitious attempt to put the whole Civil
War,
both sides, between two covers; which seemed to me only partially sue·
cessful, since by trying to show the whole scene from 1860 to 1865, from
New York to New Orleans, all with impartial value, there results
1
thousand disconnected episodes in the lives of as many people in whom
nothing has been done to create an interest.
Sholokhov is, I feel, wiser than Mrs. Scott. For while he,
too,
wants to show the whole scene, he realizes it can oe done only by creatine
an interest in the characters that live on that scene; and that we are
capable of becoming interested in only a limited number of characters
II
one time. And so, although the number of people in his book seem
limitless (which means he succeeds in creating his panorama) there m
really only a few major ones and a limited number of minor ones,
wh~~e
lives intermingle in the understandable pattern of a novel, and who are
met again and again.
One other thing which gives to Sholokhov's story and people lik
and interest I find to a degree lacking in Mrs. Scott's important
book:
I happen to know that Mrs. Scott is a Southerner. But in reading
her
comprehensive ac::ount of that titanic passionate struggle, there is not
1
line to show in which country she was born. Are her sympathies pro–
Northern or pro-Southern? Does she believe in chattel slavery or
ia
the manner in which they were freed? There is nothing to give
you
the cue. The life, the breath, of the struggle, which was the two sidti
passionate beliefs, are carefully deleted in favor of a dead impartiality.
The account of a struggle is interesting to the layman only\ if he has
1
side. The story of the battles between the Persians and Assyrians (did
they fight?) can, in detail, mean little to others than antiquarians
and
pedants; whereas a story of the French Revolution, the American
Revo–
lution, the Russian Revolution, and the Nazi What-Is-It, has significance
and therefore life for any even semi-aware person.
Don't, however, get the idea that
And Quiet Flows The
Don
is
propaganda such a> is breaking Mr. Eastman's heart. I can
ima~ne
some people's reading the book through without lmcwing the writer's
