Books by Brian Boeck
Stalin's Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival, the Life of Mikhail Sholokhov
by Brian Boeck
***Mikhail Sholokhov was winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature***
“With Sholokhov what is interesting is that he’s a man of many mysteries. It’s about the question of lies and fake news, but in a different way than we deal with it now. He’s someone who becomes the ideal Soviet writer. But his official biography has a lot of lacunas. Certain things are hidden, and other things are actually exaggerated and Brian Boeck goes through that. Sholokhov is a man who wrote so much and was politically exceptionally important, but this is the first comprehensive biography about him. It’s a political biography, but not only. There are questions, like whether his best known and most brilliant work, And Quiet Flows the Don, was stolen or not, whether he really wrote it or not, what his relationship with Stalin was. In my reading, it’s about a talent being subdued and corrupted…It’s an excellent piece of work by a historian. Boeck goes and consults the archives, some materials for the first time. He was going on an almost yearly basis to the area from which Sholokhov comes, the Rostov-on-Don area in southern Russia…It’s the work of a Western scholar who is really very immersed in his subject and in the psychology of the place that he writes about. He brings so to speak local knowledge and sensibilities to a history of one of the top Soviet intellectuals.” Read more...
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize
Serhii Plokhy, Historian
Interviews where books by Brian Boeck were recommended
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1
The Return of the Russian Leviathan
by Sergei Medvedev & Stephen Dalziel (translator) -
2
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
by Bathsheba Demuth -
3
Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future
by Kate Brown -
4
Stalin's Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival, the Life of Mikhail Sholokhov
by Brian Boeck -
5
This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia
by Joan Neuberger -
6
An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent
by Owen Matthews
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Serhii Plokhy
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Serhii Plokhy
Every year since 2013 the Russian Book Prize run by Pushkin House, a UK charity, has carried out the important task of drawing attention to books that “encourage public understanding and intelligent debate about the Russian-speaking world.” Here, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, chair of this year’s judging panel, talks us through the books that made the 2020 shortlist.