After the publication of the first part of “Quiet Don” in the magazine “October”, its author, young Mikhail Sholokhov, was bombarded with letters asking whether the hero of the novel, Grigory Melekhov, had a prototype? The author remained silent and only in 1964, when receiving the Nobel Prize, admitted that the real Grishka existed, but did not name him. Researchers of the writer’s work were able to find out his identity.
Dashing Cossack
The prototype of Grigory Melekhov was a Cossack from the Bazki farm, whose name was Kharlampy Ermakov. Like the bookish Grishka, his grandmother was a Turkish woman, whom his grandfather brought back from a campaign. For their hot temper and dark appearance, neighbors called the Ermakov family, like the Melekhovs, “Turks.” Kharlampy lived for 36 years, of which 10 years he was at war. The era of the Civil War was a complex and ambiguous time, and the same was the fate of the Cossack Ermakov.
During the First World War, Kharlampy distinguished himself as a brave soldier and dashing grunt, for which he received all four St. Georges. During the war he was shell-shocked and wounded 14 times. The Cossack meets the beginning of the Civil War with the rank of cornet, and after being wounded he finds himself in the village of Kaminskaya. [C-BLOCK]
Like the bookish Grishka, Kharlampy accepts the revolution and joins the revolutionary Cossacks of Fyodor Podtelkov. During the battle with Chernetsov’s Cossacks, Ermakov quarrels with the commander over chopped up prisoners and, wounded, leaves for the village of Veshenskaya. When the Veshenskaya Uprising broke out in March 1919, Ermakov joined it.
The reason that changed the political views of the Cossack Kharlampy was the terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks on the Don, carried out according to Sverdlov’s order for “decossackization”, dated January 24, 1919. During the retreat of the “whites” from Moscow, Ermakov was already a captain. After a series of defeats and the flight of the command abroad, Kharlampiy refuses to emigrate. He and his men surrender and go over to the “red” side.
Ermakov fights with Wrangel and the White Poles in the 1st Cavalry Army. The legendary Budyonny remembered the Cossack Ermakov and said that he was one of the best grunts. As we see, the fate of the Don Cossack Kharlampy fully corresponds life stages Grigory Melekhov.
A friend from the Bazki farm
Young Mikhail Sholokhov, already a relatively well-known writer on the Don, often visited his friend Fedor at the Bazki farm. During evening gatherings, Sholokhov meets his friend’s neighbor Kharlampy Ermakov. In private conversations, the writer learns the details of the Cossack’s life - about Turkish blood, the conflict with Podtelkov, which almost ended with his execution, and the tossing between the red and white sides.
Ermakov’s daughter Pelageya Shevchenko recalled that Sholokhov often visited their family and talked for a long time with his father. The meticulous Sholokhov wrote down everything that was said. The young writer read the first chapters of his novel aloud to Ermakov, who listened and made adjustments if necessary. Two people so different from each other came together against the backdrop of love for the Don and misunderstanding of the policy pursued by the authorities towards the Cossacks.
After the publication of the novel in 1928, one of the highest police officials hissed at Sholokhov - “you’re Mishka, a counterintuitive.” It is believed that Stalin saved the young writer and his epic. The novel plausibly shows the mistakes of the “decossackization” policy, which was initiated by Stalin’s enemy Yakov Sverdlov.
Life after the war
During his turbulent life, the Don Cossack Kharlampiy served the Tsar for 5 years, a year and a half in the White movement and 3 years in the Red Army. Ermakov spent more than two years in Soviet prisons. In January 1923, Melekhov's prototype was dismissed from the army and sent on leave as a former "white". On February 23 of the same year, he was arrested on charges of organizing the Veshensky Uprising.
The investigation was based on denunciations, which stated that Ermakov, having enormous authority among the Cossacks, openly mocked the Soviet regime. The villagers wrote a collective petition in his defense and recalled how Kharlampy prevented the Red Army soldiers from being shot. [C-BLOCK]
Ermakov was released on bail, and in May 1925 the case was closed. Kharlampy got a job in the village council and often visited the parents of Mikhail Sholokhov. They recalled that Ermakov got into the yard by jumping over a fence on horseback. This episode well characterizes the character of the Cossack. In January 1927, a new one was arrested on the same charge, and on June 17, Cossack Ermakov was shot.
Mikhail Sholokhov did not forget the Ermakov family. He came to their home and talked with Pelageya for a long time, and helped Kharlampy’s son Joseph, who, like his father, loved horses very much, to get a job at a stud farm.
Monument from the people
In 1980, an emergency occurred in the village of Veshenskaya. On the banks of the Don, an unknown person erected a monument weighing 90 kilograms. There was a sign on it with the inscription “To the prototype of the main character of The Quiet Don, a dashing grunt and desperate to a brave man. 1893 - 1927." The monument was erected by a simple Soviet worker from Nizhny Novgorod, Ivan Kaleganov.
The man was reading a novel and decided to perpetuate the memory of Ermakov. To achieve his goal, he sold his Volga and bought necessary materials. Ivan transported parts of the monument several times in a backpack and buried the elements on the banks of the Don. When everything was ready, he assembled the monument in one night, which stood for a week. Now the monument is kept in the Sholokhov Museum.
<:>After demobilization, my father lived here, in Bazki, with us. In 1926, Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov - then young, long-haired, blue-eyed - often came to Bazki to visit his father. It used to be that Kharlamov’s daughter, Verochka, and I were playing or learning lessons, and Mikhail Alexandrovich would come and tell me: Father came to Sholokhov, and they would hum for a long time at the open window in front of the Don - and until dawn, it happened... And about what - You can ask Mikhail Aleksandrovich on occasion...> 48.
Local historian G.Ya. Sivovolov cites his recording of a conversation with Pelageya Kharlampievna Ermakova, a teacher awarded the Order of Lenin for many years of work; she lived in Bazki for a long time, then moved to Veshenskaya. In a conversation with him, Pelageya Kharlampievna recalled some interesting episodes from the life of her father, which found a place on the pages of the novel and directly resonate with Sholokhov’s story about him: - she remembers, - and he jumped over her. As usual, when he sat down at the table, my father sat me and my brother on his knees, caressed me, and gave gifts> 49 .
In 1955, K. Priyma found alive the Cossack of the Bazki farm, Yakov Fotievich Losev, who, being a participant in the civil war on the Don on the part of the Reds, personally knew Kharlampy Ermakov. Yakov Losev told K. Priima:
You see, this is where Ermakov Kharlampy Vasilyevich lived, who, according to Sholokhov himself, served as the forerunner of Grishka Melekhov<:>Here is his kuren... Kharlampie’s grandfather brought himself a wife from the Turkish region, who bore him a son, Vasily, a Turk:<:>Vasily the Turk had a bunch of children. And Kharlash, three years old, was given by his father to be raised by his relatives, to us, in Bazki, to the childless Cossack Soldatov. Here are his bases and kuren above the Don. Our Kharlampy, black, hook-nosed, handsome and eccentric, left the Bazki for the royal service. On the German front he earned four St. George's Crosses and became a cornet. In the revolution he joined Podtelkov in Kamenskaya. We elected him to the revolutionary committee in Bazki. He, Ermakov, was next to Podtelkov when he hacked to death the executioner Esaul Chernetsov. And later Kharlampiy joined the whites. And he witnessed the execution of Podtelkov’s detachment in Ponomarev, but out of his hundred he did not give a single Cossack as executioner, he took everyone back to Bazki. And later, already in the Veshensky uprising of 1919, he commanded a regiment, and then a cavalry division. Soon his wife died here in Bazki. He kissed his sister of mercy and retreated with her to the Kuban. In Novorossiysk he surrendered to the Reds, probably hiding his sins in the uprising. On the Polish front in the First Cavalry he commanded a squadron, then a regiment. After the defeat of Wrangel, Budyonny appointed Ermakov head of the cavalry school in Maykop. Here it is, what kind of plan he came up with:<:>On the Polish front, he distinguished himself greatly under Budyonny, and was the head of a cavalry school in the city of Maykop. After demobilization, Ermakov returned to Bazki, and for a short time was the chairman of the mutual assistance committee. Then the widows and partisans demanded from Kharlampy an answer for his dirty deeds during the days of the Veshensky uprising. In 1927, Ermakov was seized by the GPU and, it seems, exiled to Solovki or even shot. This is Ermakov’s biography, these are the actual facts of his life:
Yes, his fate is tragic,” I said. “But I think that there was something worthwhile in Ermakov, which attracted Sholokhov’s attention to him...
Worthwhile? - asked Losev. - It probably was... After all, he knew everything about the Veshensky uprising, he knew Kudinov well, the commander of the rebellion, and he knew everything about it thoroughly! After all, there was division commander-1. It was worthwhile, apparently... I’m saying everything to reveal the most important thing: it could have been written and was written only in Veshki! Look closely and think about how deeply he has grown into the land of Veshenskaya - into our Bazki and into the Pleshakov farm, where Mikhail Alexandrovich’s father lived and worked, where the communist, mill driver Ivan Serdinov put Soviet power on its feet - Sholokhov called him Kotlyarov in his novel. .. And to Ust-Khoperskaya, from which the battery, non-party Bolshevik Fyodor Podtelkov and Ataman General Kaledin came out; and to Bokovskaya, who gave us the romance of Mikhail Krivoshlykov; and to Karginskaya, which is just as vividly depicted in the novel and where, by the way, the youth Sholokhov - according to the assurance of old-timers - from the lips of Kharlampy Ermakov himself heard the news of the tragic death of the Podtelkovites. It grew into Veshki itself, as a district village, and as the center of the Cossack rebellion in early January 1919 against General Krasnov, and as the center of the rebellion of these same Cossacks against the de-Cossackization of the Don by the Trotskyists in March 1919, a rebellion that then turned into a counter-revolutionary... To write, you had to know all this from life, study it from documents, thoroughly verify it, sift through mountains of materials in archives, listen to hundreds - and maybe thousands! - human confessions, breathe them into human images, each of which has become original, unique and unforgettable. To do all this,” concluded old Losev, “you also had to be born on Veshensk land and, moreover, be born Sholokhov!” 50.
We provide such detailed and irrefutable evidence about the relationship between Sholokhov and Kharlampy Ermakov because they even question the very fact of the writer’s acquaintance with Kharlampy Ermakov, and, as stated earlier, the authenticity of Sholokhov’s letter to Ermakov. Meanwhile, Priyma met in Bazki the Cossack Yakov Fedorovich Pyatikov, who called himself Ermakov’s orderly, who told him:
And they talked for a long time. Everything, of course, is about the German and civil war. Well, my commander had something to remember and tell. Ermakov had a book of his stories and a letter from Sholokhov. Suddenly he showed me...
It seems miraculous that the epic about the Cossacks was published at a time when even the word “Cossack” was banned. Before the first excerpts from the novel were published 85 years ago, only the participants knew about the events that unfolded on the Don, but the man who became the prototype of the main character of the novel, Grigory Melekhov, was not destined to read about his life.
He lived in a neighboring village on the opposite bank of the Don, his name was Kharlampy Ermakov. Outwardly, Ermakov and Grishka Melekhov are similar; their track records coincide almost literally. Kharlampiy went from being a soldier to becoming an officer in the First world war he is a full Knight of St. George. IN civil war Ermakov was with the Reds, then commanded a rebel division, served with the Whites, and then in the Bolshevik cavalry.
Ermakov was called a brave swordsman for his courage and for the fact that he perfectly mastered the special technique of chopping with a saber. The blow of colossal force was fought with the so-called “pull”, so that it hit both the rider and the horse. The writer “gave” possession of this blow to Grigory Melekhov.
An employee of the historical and demonstration hall of the FSB Directorate for the Rostov Region, Mikhail Polyakov, explained: “He was a grunt in combat, strong-willed. But he found himself in such difficult situations..." Today, the criminal cases of Kharlampy Ermakov are exhibits of the recently opened FSB museum. The first arrest was in 1923, a year later he was released on bail, and in 1927 the OGPU collegium charged Ermakov with the notorious 58th article “13 thousand people in one year were repressed by Yezhov’s decree in the North Caucasus region. Of these, five thousand were sentenced to death directly in this order. Five thousand!” says Mikhail Polyakov.
There were few explanations for the arrestee in the case: apparently, the investigators were not too interested in them. But there is a letter from Sholokhov, who asked “Comrade Ermakov” for another meeting to clarify information “about the era of 1919.” Kharlampy Vasilievich told the writer about the Veshensky uprising - key event novel.
Kharlampy Ermakov lived in the house in the Bazki farm, not counting the years when he fought or was arrested. It was here that Mikhail Sholokhov came more than once to meet with the prototype of the main character of his novel. Now the house has changed a little - it is covered with slate. Its current inhabitants remember the stories of Ermakov’s daughter. Unlike Grigory’s daughter Polyushka, who in the novel “died from swallowing,” Pelageya Kharlampievna lived a long time and assured that Budyonny himself wanted to save her father, but the messenger was late.
Kharlampy Ermakov is respected and remembered to this day. The funds of the Mikhail Sholokhov Museum-Reserve contain a homemade monument. Once, even before the rehabilitation of the Cossack, he appeared on a steep bank near the Kalininsky farm - the prototype of the Tatarsky farm. Director State Museum-Reserve M.A. Sholokhov Alexander Sholokhov said: “There were serious discussions among the responsible workers about what to do with it. Because the man approached the issue thoroughly: the monument has an anchor from below, he concreted this anchor, and by the time it was necessary There was a decision to be made, the concrete had already set. In general, the question was that only a tractor could move it.”
At the insistence of Mikhail Sholokhov, the monument was not destroyed, but was carefully dismantled and handed over to the Ermakovs. Then it turned out that it was made by the driver of the Gorky Automobile Plant, Ivan Kaleganov, who brought it from afar and installed it under the cover of darkness. The shocked reader of "Quiet Don" learned about Ermakov from the village residents. "This is an amazing combination of literature with life, when life hits literary pages, and this literature is already beginning to be perceived as a real thing,” Alexander Sholokhov is sure.
But if literary hero waited open ending then life real person ended in execution. Kharlampiy Ermakov was shot in 1927 a few months before the publication of the novel.
In "Quiet Don" there are about 1000 characters, more than a third of them - real people, whose descendants hid their relationship even after “grandfather,” as Sholokhov’s fellow countrymen called him, was awarded Nobel Prize. Therefore, new facts and surprising circumstances surround the book to this day.
As Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of the epic novel, stated, “ Quiet Don", his favorite character in the book was Grigory Melekhov. Image of this hero, his fate and even his appearance were copied from a real person - Kharlampy Vasilyevich Ermakov.
Sholokhov was personally acquainted with the prototype of the main character of his novel; they often met and talked in 1926, when the writer was collecting materials for his work. The author came to the village of Veshenskaya, and he and Ermakov spent long nights talking, smoking and arguing. One of the archives contains a letter in which the writer addresses Ermakov with a request to meet. Sholokhov was then very interested in the events of 1919 related to the fate of the Don Cossacks during the Veshensky uprising.
It is no coincidence that the author turned specifically to Kharlampy Ermakov. The fate of this legendary man was not easy. He was born on the Antipov farm in the Veshenskaya village, now in the Rostov region. He grew up in an ordinary Cossack family and graduated from the local parochial school. Ermakov’s childhood and youth were not distinguished by anything special; they passed like those of most of his fellow countrymen.
Kharlampiy Vasilievich Ermakov (February 7, 1891, Antipov village of the village of Vyoshenskaya Region of the Don Army (now Sholokhovsky district of the Rostov region) - June 17, 1927, Millerovo of the North Caucasus region (now Rostov region) - participant in the Civil War, one of the prototypes of Grigory Melekhov in the novel by M.A. Sholokhov "Quiet Don".
Born on the Antipov farm of the village of Vyoshenskaya Region of the Don Army, in the family of a Don Cossack. At the age of two years, he was given to be raised by the family of relatives Arkhip Gerasimovich and Ekaterina Ivanovna Soldatov, who lived on the Bazki farm of the same village. The reason for this decision was the loss of his father's ability to work due to the loss of his hand. right hand. He received his education at the Vyoshenskaya two-year parish school. At the age of 19 he married a Cossack woman, Praskovya Ilyinichna. In 1911, their daughter Pelageya was born, and in 1913 their son Joseph.
In January 1913, he was called up for active service in the Don 12th Cossack Regiment. On April 25, 1914 he graduated from the training team and was appointed platoon commander. With the outbreak of the First World War, he found himself on the Southwestern Front, where he fought until the autumn of 1916. Then he gets to the Romanian front. During 2.5 years of war he was awarded four St. George's crosses and four St. George's medals. Was wounded twice. The first time - September 21, 1915 near Kovel; and until November 26 he was treated in a hospital in the city of Sarny. On November 20, 1916, he was wounded in Romania, in the battle for height 1467. After this wound, he was sent for treatment to the Rostov hospital. Upon recovery, on January 25, 1917, he received a two-month leave to improve his health and returned to his native farm. Then, due to the expiration of the four-year period of active service, he receives a three-month “preferential” leave.
In May 1917, fellow countrymen elected Kharlampy Ermakov (by this time he had the rank of constable) as a deputy from the Vyoshenskaya village on the Big Military Circle, who elected Ataman Kaledin. In June he was again mobilized into the army, in the 2nd Don Cossack reserve regiment, located in the village of Kamenskaya. From his regiment, he is elected to the Regional Military Committee, a self-governing body of military units formed on July 14, 1917 at the regional congress of representatives of infantry and Cossack units in Novocherkassk. In the summer he completes general education courses at the Novocherkassk cadet school.
With the outbreak of the Civil War on the Don, it was supported by the Don Military Revolutionary Committee, headed by F. Podtyolkov and N. M. Golubev. He fought against Chernetsov’s detachment, was wounded near the Likhaya station, and at the end of January 1918 returned home again. Installed on the Don Soviet power, and Ermakov is elected chairman of the Vyoshensky village Council. He held this position until the start of the anti-Bolshevik uprising in the Upper Don District, which occurred on April 16-20. Later, the Don press called him one of the organizers of the coup. For his participation in this uprising, he receives the rank of sub-soror. With the restoration of ataman rule, Kh. Ermakov was elected ataman of the Vyoshenskaya village. However, the service of the Reds causes distrust in him - and at the village meeting held on May 14, he was re-elected as second assistant to the chieftain.
In the summer and autumn of 1918, Kh. Ermakov, as a platoon commander of the 1st Vyoshensky Regiment of the Don Army, fought against the Red Army in the Tsaritsyn and Balashov directions. When at the end of December, tired of the war and promoted by the Reds, the Cossacks abandoned the front, he returned home. A month later, fulfilling the instructions of the circular letter of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) “on decossackization” dated January 24, 1919, the Red Army began terror in the Upper Don. February 25th Art. An uprising broke out in the village of Kazanskaya. On February 26, the rebels liberated Migulinskaya, and on the 27th - Vyoshenskaya village. On the same day, the cornet Kh. Ermakov begins the formation of a rebel detachment of the right-bank farmsteads. Two days later, Ermakov’s detachment advances to the village of Karginskaya, where it defeats Likhachev’s punitive detachment and captures the Red artillery warehouses. On March 5, the old people of the Bazki farm gave him command of the Bazki hundred. A few days later, the commander of the rebel troops P. Kudinov appointed him commander of the 1st Upper Don Division instead of Yesaul Alferov. For 3 months, Ermakov’s division has been successfully fighting on the southern sector of the rebel front against units of the 9th Army of the Southern Front of the Red Army, which was advancing on Novocherkassk. In May, under pressure from new enemy reinforcements, the rebels retreat to the left bank of the Don. But a day later, General Sekretev’s group breaks through the red front and joins the rebel army. The Red Army leaves the Upper Don District.
After joining the Don Army, the rebel army is gradually disbanded, the rebel commanders are replaced by career officers of the Don Army. Kh. Ermakov remains in his previous position longer than others. He commands the 1st Verkhne-Donskaya Division (renamed the 1st Verkhne-Donskaya Brigade) until July 1 (14). On this day, Ermakov’s brigade joins the 5th Cavalry Brigade. Ermakov himself receives the post of commander of the hundred of the 20th Vyoshensky regiment. Some time later, Kh. Ermakov is appointed as an officer for assignments at the headquarters of Semiletov’s group. In August he was wounded near the village of Filonovskaya. In October, upon returning from the hospital, he was appointed assistant regiment commander for economic affairs. In December, Ataman A. Bogaevsky promoted to centurion, in January to podesaul, in February to esaul, and was transferred to the position of assistant regiment commander for combat units.
At the end of February, the Don Army retreated to Kuban. March 3 this year Art., near the village of Georgie-Afipskaya, Kh. Ermakov, together with his unit, surrendered to the Red-Greens, and on March 15 he transferred to the Red Army. Received under his command the 3rd separate cavalry. regiment of the 1st Cavalry Army, formed from Cossacks who joined the Red Army. He commanded him on the Polish front. Then he was appointed commander of the 82nd regiment and sent to the Wrangel Front. After the capture of Crimea, Ermakov was sent to the Don to fight the “gangs” of Makhno, Popov and Andreyanov. In mid-1921, he was appointed head of the Kraskomov school of the 14th Cavalry. divisions in Maykop. He was awarded a saber and a personalized watch. M. A. Sholokhov wrote in 1974 to literary critic K. I. Priyma:
In January 1923, Kh. Ermakov was dismissed from the army on indefinite leave “as a former white man.” A month later he returned home. And already on February 23, 1923 he was arrested by the GPU. Ermakov was accused of organizing the Vyoshensky uprising in 1919 under Article 58 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The investigation lasted almost a year and a half, however, it could not prove his guilt: most witnesses testified during the investigation that Ermakov was forcibly mobilized into the rebel army by P. Kudinov and other leaders of the uprising; they remembered how he saved captured Red Army soldiers from execution. The villagers drew up a collective petition in his defense. Thanks to this, on July 19, 1924, Kh. Ermakov was released on bail. The investigation lasted another 10 months, and perhaps would have continued longer, but in April a plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) was held, which decided on the partial rehabilitation of the Cossacks. As a result, on May 15, 1925, the visiting session of the North Caucasus Court in the city of Millerovo decided to terminate the case “due to expediency.”
After his release, Ermakov served in the village council and cooperation. During these years, M. A. Sholokhov often visited the parents of M. A. Sholokhov, who lived in Karginskaya, and made an acquaintance with him. In the last investigative case Ermakov has preserved a letter to him from Sholokhov dated April 6, 1926, in which the young writer asks for some information about the Upper Don Uprising of 1919. Subsequently, many details of the biography of Kh. Ermakov were used by Sholokhov for the biography of Grigory Melekhov.
On January 20, 1927, Ermakov was arrested again. This time, the investigation found witnesses who claimed that he voluntarily took command of the rebels, personally participated in the execution of Red Army soldiers, and that he was currently conducting anti-Soviet agitation. On June 6, 1927, the judicial panel of the OGPU, having considered the case out of court under Articles 58/11 and 58/18 of the Criminal Code, decided that Kharlampy Vasilyevich Ermakov should be “shot.” On June 17, the sentence was carried out.
