shades of the Pynchon Committee

[pynchonoid]

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 23.08.2006

Rumours have long been in circulation, but now Felix
Philipp Ingold is convinced that the Russian author
Mikhail Sholokhov, who received the 1965 Nobel Prize
for literature, was an imposter. Large chunks of
"Tales from the Don," the novel for which he is best
known, were copied from an unpublished manuscript by
the Cossack military writer Fyodor Kryukov. "Obviously
Mikhail Sholokhov, despite being publicly glorified as
the 'proletariat Tolstoy', was nothing but a poorly
read and utterly inexperienced writer who was
recruited by the Soviet secret service GPU and
prepared for the role of the great writer and party
man of letters. The GPU (in other words not Sholokhov
himself) not only intended systematically to exhaust
Kryukov's quantitatively and qualitatively fertile
manuscript, they also combined it with other texts to
create a coherent lifework that would be considered
exemplary in Soviet literature as a whole. That bits
of texts by Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrey Platonov were
added to the aggregate, writers who had long been
considered non-persons in the USSR, only adds more
spice to the enterprise."

http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/914.html

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