Mikhail Sholokhov

Mikhail Sholokhov was born in 1905 in the Don Cossack region of southern Russia, in a hamlet belonging to the stanitsa of Vyoshenskaya. His schooling was cut short by the revolution and civil war, which swept repeatedly through the Don lands and which he witnessed as a boy. In the early 1920s he went to Moscow, took manual jobs and joined young proletarian writers’ circles, then returned to the Don, where he lived for the rest of his life.

His first book, Tales from the Don (1926), drew on the violence of the civil war. He then began And Quiet Flows the Don, published in four volumes between 1928 and 1940. Following the Cossack Grigory Melekhov as he wavers between the Reds and the Whites, it portrays the destruction of a traditional way of life with a breadth and tragic sympathy that recalled Tolstoy, and it remained striking for not reducing its hero to a political lesson. It won the Stalin Prize in 1941. Virgin Soil Upturned addressed the collectivisation of agriculture, and the postwar story The Fate of a Man depicted a soldier’s suffering with stark compassion.

Sholokhov became an official figure: a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, an academician and an outspoken defender of the regime, notoriously denouncing the dissident writers Sinyavsky and Daniel in 1966. Doubts about the authorship of his great novel, first raised in 1928, persisted for decades; the rediscovery of manuscripts in the 1990s was taken by Russian scholars to support his authorship. He received the Nobel Prize in 1965 and died in Vyoshenskaya in 1984.