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Abstract:

Sholokhov and Mayakovsky are contemporaries. The first two books of “And Quiet Flows the Don” (1928) were published during the lifetime of the poet. Sholokhov could not pass by Mayakovsky and his work. According to the memoirs of the writer’s wife M.P. Sholokhova, the Sholokhov’s listened to Mayakovsky’s speech at one of the literary evenings in Moscow, probably at the Polytechnic Museum. As the head of the circle of young writers at the Vyoshenskaya district newspaper in the early 1930s, Sholokhov gave a lecture on Mayakovsky. Sholokhov named Mayakovsky among the greatest writers of the epoch in his speech at the meeting in memory of A.S. Serafimovich (1963). The writer’s eldest daughter S.M. Sholokhova reported that Mayakovsky was not the favorite poet of Sholokhov, who preferred the classics. Nevertheless, before traveling abroad, the writer quoted famous lines from “The Poem of the Soviet Passport”. N.N. Aseev was the first to put the names of Mayakovsky and Sholokhov next to each other in his article published in the “Literary Gazette”. From his point of view, the work of these writers manifested the “most characteristic features” of Soviet literature. N.V. Kornienko repeatedly addressed the subject “Sholokhov and Mayakovsky” in her monographs and articles. She identified allusions to Mayakovsky’s works and the style of his metaphors in the speech of Shchukar’s grandfather from Sholokhov’s novel “Virgin Soil Upturned”, drew parallels between the relationship of Mayakovsky and Lily Brik, on the one hand, and Nagulnov and his wife Lushka, on the other, drew attention to Sholokhov’s rendering of the cultural context of the 1920s, expressed with exceptional force in Mayakovsky’s works. The researcher rightly pointed out the need to search for Mayakovsky’s “trace” in Sholokhov’s main novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”. Such a typological convergence, or, apparently, a Mayakovsky allusion, is found in the landscape description of the Rostov embankment, along which Bunchuk and Anna Pogudko stroll, becoming not only associates in the revolutionary struggle, but also people who love each other. Sholokhov reinterprets the motifs of Mayakovsky’s famous poem “Naval Love” in the images, building his own internal form, creating the “grain” of the plotline of the characters, solving other artistic problems relevant to his novel.