Did Mikhail Sholokhov Write The Quiet Don?

This chapter discusses the novel “The Quiet Don” and the controversy over its authorship. It briefly recounts some of the relevant events of World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War. The chapter focuses on Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov who was awarded by the Nobel Committee in 1945 for the literature prize on his magnum opus, the four-volume The Quiet Don. It also looks into the initial claim that Sholokhov stole the book manuscript for The Quiet Don in a map case that belonged to a White Guard who had been killed in battle. It talks about an anonymous author known as Irina Medvedeva-Tomashevskaia, who wrote several historical studies and claimed that Sholokhov had plagiarized an unpublished manuscript of Fedor Dmitrievich Kriukov.

How Inauthentic was James Macpherson’s “Translation” of Ossian?

This chapter talks about the Scottish poet James Macpherson. It analyzes Macpherson's publication of the “Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland,” which he claimed was his own translation into English from old Gaelic manuscripts he discovered in the Scottish Highlands. It also looks into “Fingal,” an Ancient Epic Poem or cycle of poetry presumably sung by the legendary Scottish bard Ossian, which Macpherson also claimed was a translation from the Gaelic. The chapter examines the Ossian cycle that stimulated investigations and searches for ethnic folk literature, particularly for national epics throughout Europe and Russia that represented the mystical spirit of the nation. It looks into skeptics, such as Samuel Johnson, David Hume, and Horace Walpole who expressed doubt about the authenticity of Macpherson's translations.