Fyodor Dmitrievich Kryukov February 1870 — 4 March 1920) was a Cossack

Cossack

Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic people who originally were members of democratic, semi-military communities in what is today Ukraine and Southern Russia inhabiting sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper and Don basins and who played an important role in the...

 writer and soldier in the White Army, died in 1920 of Typhoid fever

Typhoid fever

Typhoid fever, also known as Typhoid, is a common worldwide bacterial disease, transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, which contain the bacterium Salmonella enterica, serovar Typhi...

. Various literary critics, most notably Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

 and Roy Medvedev

Roy Medvedev

Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev |Georgia]]) is a Russian historian renowned as the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge , first published in English in 1972...

, claimed that Mikhail Sholokov plagiarised

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...

 his work in order to write major parts of And Quiet Flows the Don

And Quiet Flows the Don

And Quiet Flows the Don or Quietly Flows the Don is the first part of the great Don epic Tikhiy Don , written by Michail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. It originally appeared in serialized form between 1928 and 1940...

. This was also the conclusion of a statistical analysis by V. P. and T. G. Fomenko. Their conclusion has been questioned by a more recent analysis. Ze'ev Bar-Sela believes that although the book was plagiarised, it was plagiarised from Venyamin Alekseevich Krasnushkin, and not from Kryukov.

A 1984 monograph by Geir Kjetsaa

Geir Kjetsaa

Geir Kjetsaa was a Norwegian professor in Russian literary history at the University of Oslo, translator of Russian literature, and author of several biographies of classical Russian writers....

 and others demonstrated through statistical analyses that Sholokhov was indeed the likely author of Don. And in 1987, several thousand pages of notes and drafts of the work were discovered and authenticated, including chapters excluded from the final draft.

During the second world war, Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid, and only the fourth volume survived. Sholokhov had his friend Vassily Kudashov, who was killed in the war, look after it. Following Kudashov's death, his widow took possession of the manuscript, but she never disclosed the fact of owning it. The manuscript was finally found by the Institute of World Literature of Russia's Academy of Sciences in 1999 with assistance from the Russian Government. The writing paper dates back to the 1920s: 605 pages are in Sholokhov's own hand, and 285 are transcribed by his wife Maria and sisters. However, there are claims that the manuscript is just a copy of the Kryukov's manuscript.

Kryukov is mentioned at length in Solzhenitsyn's novel November 1916 where he is called "Fyodor Dmitrievich Kovynev". He was an anti-bolshevik

Anti-bolshevism

Anti-bolshevism has two principal forms:* Anti-bolshevik Anti-communism* Anti-Bolshevik Communism...

.

External links

• Фёдор Крюков в библиотеке А. Белоусенко (in Russian)