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The First Step into Literature

90 years ago, on September, 19, 1923, the newspaper “Yunosheskaya Pravda”, issue 35, published a feuilleton “The Trial” (an incident from the life of one of the counties in the Dvinsk Region) under the name of M.Sholokhov. It was the first step of the future Nobel Prize winner into literature.

The story tells about the secretary of the Young Communist League district committee, who when seeing off a trade worker Tyutikov at the railway station asked him to pretend a sort of a “NEPman” and secretly check the secretary of the rural Party cell Pokusayev, who was going to the agricultural exhibition, for his political reliability. Tyutikov provoked Pokusayev and the latter, in response, gave him a thrashing.

“The man, no doubt, is trustworthy,– Tyutikov wrote at the station, – but…– he took a look at his dirty coat, touched his bruised knee and silently whispered something with his swollen lips…”

On October, 1923, the “Yunosheskaya Pravda” published a feuilleton “The Three” and on April, 12, 1924, when the newspaper was renamed “Molodoy Leninets”, a feuilleton “Inspector” was published.

The feuilletons by Sholokhov reflected an everyday life, the fight against the NEP ideology and were satirically directed against the remnants of the past and modern bureaucracy. At that time it was the first journalistic pen test of the writer.

Galina Smirnova