Under the title Qui a écrit "le Don paisible"? the anonymous French translation of Roj Medvedev's study Zagadki tvorceskoj biografii Mixaila Soloxova (Riddles of Mixail Soloxov's Creative Biography) came out in the summer of 1975…. [It] represents the second major publication on the controversial subject of the authorship of The Quiet Don…. Medvedev is a more thorough, cautious, and impartial investigator…. In the face of all [its] good points, Medvedev's study suffers from a glaring defect: a rather scarce use of materials published during the civil war by the Whites and an absence of reference to White Russian émigré sources. Medvedev obviously had only a very limited access to these sources, without which no serious investigation of the historical background of The Quiet Don can be complete. (p. 293)

Although Medvedev does not claim to have arrived at a definite conclusion, his strong preference for [Fedor Dmitrievic Krjukov (1870–1920)] as the...