Mikhail Sholokhov was born on May 11 (24), 1905 on the Kruzhilin farm (now the Rostov region) in the family of an employee of a trading enterprise.

The first education in Sholokhov's biography was received in Moscow during the First World War. Then he studied at the gymnasium in the Voronezh province in the city of Boguchar. Arriving in Moscow to continue his education and not enrolling, he was forced to change many working specialties in order to feed himself. At the same time, in the life of Mikhail Sholokhov there was always time for self-education.

The beginning of the literary path

His works were first published in 1923. Creativity in the life of Sholokhov has always played an important role. After publishing feuilletons in newspapers, the writer publishes his stories in magazines. In 1924, the newspaper Molodoy Leninets published the first of a cycle of Sholokhov's Don stories - "The Mole". Later, all the stories from this cycle were combined into three collections: Don Stories (1926), Azure Steppe (1926) and About Kolchak, Nettles and Others (1927).

The heyday of creativity

Sholokhov became widely known for his work about the Don Cossacks during the war - the novel Quiet Don (1928-1932).

This epic eventually became popular not only in the USSR, but also in Europe, Asia, and was translated into many languages.

Another famous novel by M. Sholokhov is Virgin Soil Upturned (1932-1959). This novel about the times of collectivization in two volumes won the Lenin Prize in 1960.

From 1941 to 1945 Sholokhov worked as a war correspondent. During this time, he wrote and published several stories, essays ("The Science of Hatred" (1942), "On the Don", "Cossacks" and others).
Sholokhov's famous works are also: the story "The Fate of a Man" (1956), the unfinished novel "They Fought for the Motherland" (1942-1944, 1949, 1969).

It is worth noting that an important event in the biography of Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965 was the receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature for the epic novel "Quiet Flows the Don".

last years of life

From the 60s, Sholokhov practically ceased to engage in literature, he liked to devote time to hunting and fishing. He donated all his awards to charity (the construction of new schools).
The writer died on February 21, 1984 from cancer and was buried in the courtyard of his house in the village of Veshenskaya on the banks of the Don River.

Chronological table

Other biography options

• When Sholokhov came to woo one of the daughters of P. Ya. Gromoslavsky, the former Cossack ataman offered to marry his other daughter, the eldest Maria. In 1924 they got married. They lived in marriage for 60 years, four children were born in the family.
• Sholokhov was the only Soviet writer who received the Nobel Prize with the approval of the current government. He was called "Stalin's favorite", although Sholokhov is one of the few who were not afraid to tell the leader the truth.
• Around the name of Sholokhov, the problem of the authorship of his works periodically surfaced. After the publication of the novel The Quiet Don, the question arose: how such a young writer could create such a voluminous work in such a short period. By order of Joseph Stalin, a commission was even created, which, having studied the writer's manuscript, confirmed its authorship.
• In 1958, along with Sholokhov, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Questions

1. In what environment and under the influence of what events in the life of the country did the formation of Platonov the thinker and Platonov the artist take place?

2. How did Platonov's attitude to the revolution and its consequences change? What decisively did the writer not accept in contemporary Soviet reality?

3. What types does A. Platonov divide his heroes into?

Tasks

Prepare posts by topic:

“The work of life and serving it” (based on the story “The Secret Man”)

"Problematics of the story "The Secret Man"

(1905 - 1984)

Sholokhov was born on May 24, 1905 in the Kruzhilin farm, near the village of Veshenskaya, in the Don Cossack Region, was not a Cossack by birth. His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Sholokhov, was the son of a Russian merchant; mother, Anastasia Danilovna Chernikova, was from Ukrainian serfs. Michael's father wanted his son to get a good education and apparently have enough money to pay for it. Trained by a local teacher, in 1912 Mikhail entered an elementary school in the Kargin farm, where his parents lived at that time. In the 1914-1915 academic year, he attended a private gymnasium in Moscow. For the next three years he studied at a gymnasium in the city of Boguchar (Voronezh province), and from the autumn of 1918 he studied for several months at the Veshenskaya gymnasium. The teaching was interrupted by the civil war. Sholokhov tried to fill in the gaps in his education with abundant reading.

The fact that during the civil war Sholokhov lived almost all the time in the territory occupied by the Whites was of great importance. This must have been the main reason why he, in his own words, described in The Quiet Don "the struggle of the whites against the reds, and not the reds against the whites."

Since 1922, Sholokhov, living in his native places, worked in various positions for the new regime. He taught adults to read and write, and was a statistician for about a year. On December 2, 1921, he transferred to the Karginsky procurement office to the position of an assistant accountant, and a month later he was appointed clerk of the inspection department. The events of the period 1920-1922 provided themes for most of Sholokhov's early stories (which were reflected in The Quiet Don). The beginning of Sholokhov's literary career belongs to this period of his life.

In October 1922, Sholokhov left for Moscow in the hope of becoming a writer and continuing his education. The capital did not welcome the young pre-inspector with open arms. He was forced to work as a laborer, loader, bricklayer, clerk. This enriched his life experience, allowed him to better and deeper know the life of a simple worker. In Moscow, Sholokhov joined a group of Komsomol writers attached to the Young Guard magazine. Since 1923: “I have been published in Komsomol newspapers and magazines,” Sholokhov said (although he himself repeatedly emphasized in his interviews the fact that he had never been a member of the Komsomol). However, the Komsomol newspaper Yunosheskaya Pravda was the first printed organ that provided Sholokhov with its pages.

In 1925 (this year Sholokhov's father died), the stories “Bakhchevnik”, “Shepherd”, “Nakhalenok”, the story “The Path-road” are printed one after another. In 1926, the first collection of Sholokhov's stories, Don Stories, Azure Steppe, appeared in print. The main theme of Sholokhov's early stories is the class struggle on the Don. The result of Sholokhov's many years of creative work was four large books of The Quiet Flows the Don. Already in 1928, the October magazine began publishing the novel Quiet Flows the Don. In 1941, the novel was awarded the State (Stalin) Prize of the first degree.

In 1932, Sholokhov was admitted to the CPSU (b), he was also elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In 1938, the Academic Council of the Institute of World Literature nominated Sholokhov as a candidate for a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in January, Sholokhov was awarded the Order of Lenin (for outstanding achievements in the development of Soviet literature, 6 times). In 1931-1932, Sholokhov made his first foreign trips to Germany, Sweden, Denmark, England, and France.

During the Great Patriotic War, the writer did not stay away from the struggle. In military correspondence and essays, “he reveals the anti-human nature of the war unleashed by the Nazis. In 1943, Sholokhov began work on the novel They Fought for the Motherland.
In the post-war years, Sholokhov was engaged in a lot of social activities as a deputy of the Supreme Council. In 1957, Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov made a trip to Finland and Sweden, and in 1959 he went to Italy, France, Great Britain. In 1960 he became the winner of the prize in the field of literature, and in 1962 Sholokhov was elected a doctor of law at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1965, M. Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize. In 1980 M.A. Sholokhov was awarded the second Golden Star of the Hero of Socialist Labor (awarded twice).

The Quiet Don novel

Around this work, disputes about the true authorship are still ongoing. Monographs, where the authorship of the great novel was disputed, were published far from Moscow. One of them - under the pseudonym "D" - was published through the efforts of A.I. Solzhenitsyn, entitled "The stirrup of the Quiet Flows the Don". This book was printed in Russian in Paris (which, you see, is rather suspicious). The other was written by Roy Medvedev, who did not hide his authorship, a well-known publicist and historian (formerly a dissident, then a people's deputy of the USSR). His book has been printed in English and French in London and Paris. The appearance of these works sowed strong doubt in the minds of Russian readers regarding the authorship of Mikhail Sholokhov. Later, other authors of the popular novel began to appear, for example, Fyodor Kryukov (who died in 1920, a forgotten Russian writer, a native of the Don). How to refute the assumptions, hypotheses developed by such authoritative people as A.I. Solzhenitsyn, R.A. Medvedev, the anonymous writer "D" and other literary critics who appeared in different cities of the country, contenders for the authorship of the novel "Quiet Don". The only evidence of Sholokhov's authorship could be the manuscripts. But there are no manuscripts of the first and second volumes of the novel, not a single page, in any of the archives. Namely, the first two volumes of The Quiet Flows the Don, published in 1928, gave rise to doubts about the authorship. This strange, at first glance, circumstance, when half of the novel is partially preserved, and the other half is not, there is a historical (logical) explanation. The writer's house on the Don came under fire when Veshenskaya was on the front line in 1942. Then the writer's mother was killed on the threshold of the house. At the same time, sheets of manuscripts written by the hand of Mikhail Sholokhov flew around the village. The soldiers used the sheets of the novel to smoke. There are eyewitnesses of this catastrophe. Some of the sheets were picked up and preserved by people who returned them to the author after the war. It would seem that such a tragedy, when the blood of a loved one drips onto the white sheets of a novel, when manuscripts perish during the hours of a national tragedy, could cool the ardor of the refutors, find compassion in the hearts of people. Doubts about the authorship of Sholokhov should have been dispelled, but the false authors did not calm down.

One literary critic Lev Kolodny decided to find the true author of The Quiet Flows the Don. Comparing episodes from the life of Sholokhov with the text of the novel, Kolodny was convinced that the author of The Quiet Flows the Don was Sholokhov. Hospital addresses, street names - everything is authentic, these are Moscow addresses. For example, Dr. Snegirev's eye clinic, Kolpachny Lane. These are by no means fictitious names. In a minute, having picked up a weighty volume of the Suvorin edition of the “Address and Reference Book for 1913”, not without reason called “All Moscow”, Lev Kolodny found out that K.V. Snegirev really was located on Kolpachny Lane, 11. According to eyewitnesses, acquaintances, friends, relatives, Sholokhov did visit the above places personally. Few people know that he had a permanent address in Moscow (this was verified by Kolodny on permanent mailing lists). “...manuscripts do not burn” - this was proved to us by Lev Kolodny in his book, thus confirming the authorship of Mikhail Sholokhov, the true author of the novel “Quiet Flows the Don”.

The Quiet Flows the Don is one of the most remarkable works of socialist realism, and its author should be awarded the highest award.

The history of the creation of the novel "Quiet Flows the Don"

Sholokhov conceived a great novel about the people and the revolution in the mid-1920s. The desire to create a novel about the Don, to show the Cossacks during the period of dramatic events that preceded the 1917 revolution arose in the writer while working on the Don stories and has not left him since. In October 1925, he began work on a novel, which was called "Donshchina". The book was conceived as a story, quite traditional for Soviet literature, about the fierce struggle for the victory of Soviet power on the Don in the autumn of 1917-spring of 1918. At the beginning of work on the novel, Sholokhov encountered great difficulties. He doubted that he would cope with the task, and also that he had chosen the right path.

After writing several chapters, Sholokhov put aside the manuscript of Donshchina for some time. Postponing work on Donshchina, Sholokhov began to think about a broader novel. So, in the process of work, the writer came up with the idea to trace the ideological revolution of the Don Cossacks, to reveal the reasons for the complications of his paths in a difficult time for Russia. He understood that without revealing the historically established conditions of life and life of the people, without explaining the reasons that prompted a significant part of him to take the side of the White Guards, the novel that began with the Kornilov rebellion, the campaign of the Cossack troops against Petrograd, would not solve the problem of the people's paths in the revolution. To do this, first of all, it was necessary to reveal the world of his life with all the complexities and contradictions. Pushing the narrative back to the time preceding the imperialist war, the writer sought to show the growth of revolutionary sentiment among his heroes, the scope of the people's struggle for a new life. The transition from one idea to another led to a change in the name of the novel - "Quiet Don".

The meaning invested in this name, Sholokhov sought to reveal with the whole figurative structure of the narrative, as an epic canvas about the fate of the Russian people in their struggle for freedom. The writer set a goal to create the very image of the "Quiet Don", to show the life of the people and the important changes in it caused by the revolution. The main idea of ​​the writer is hidden in the title of the novel, which is also concentrated in epigraphs, borrowed, like the title of the novel, from folk art.
The idea of ​​a new novel, according to the author himself, fully matured at the end of 1926. After that, Sholokhov began to actively collect material. It was at this time that the writer moved to the village of Veshenskaya and forever connected his creative destiny with it. The work on the novel required hard and intense work. The life of the Cossack farm was familiar to the writer from childhood. But, despite this, Sholokhov made many trips to the surrounding farms and villages, recording the memoirs of participants and witnesses of the First World War and the revolution; stories of old people about the life and life of the Cossacks of those years. Collecting and studying Cossack folklore, the writer traveled to the archives of Moscow and Rostov to study newspapers and magazines, get acquainted with old books on the history of the Don Cossacks, special military literature, and contemporaries' memoirs of the imperialist and civil wars.
Sholokhov carefully thought out the plan of his novel, and later changed only the details, although, according to him, much had to be rethought and redone many times. Selecting and systematizing the material for the novel, Sholokhov did a huge and complex work of the historian. He resorted to the abundant use of documents, confirming the depicted events and facts by citing appeals, leaflets, telegrams, appeals, letters, declarations, resolutions and orders. Some chapters of the novel are entirely based on these documents. In the process of working on the structure of the book, the author had to intersperse a lot of events, facts, people and at the same time not lose the main characters in them.

A year later, the first book of the epic "Quiet Don" was published in the magazine "October", in 1928 - the second, which absorbed the once shelved chapters of "Donshchina". One could have expected the release of the third book just as soon, but suddenly the matter slowed down.

In the autumn of 1926, the writer sat down to his planned work, and a year later the first book of the epic Quiet Don was published in the October magazine, in 1928 the second book, which absorbed the once shelved chapters of Donshchina. One could have expected the release of the third book just as soon, but suddenly the matter slowed down. The reason for everything turned out to be the problems of a “non-literary nature”. In the center of the narrative of the third book is the Cossack uprising of 1919, a topic too painful for the new government. A heated controversy begins around the chapters of this book, often taking the form of outright attacks. The writer and influential literary functionary A. Fadeev strongly recommends that the author immediately, in the third book, make Grigory Melekhov "ours". Sholokhov writes: “... Fadeev offers me to make such changes that are unacceptable to me in any way ... I would rather not print at all than do it against my will, to the detriment of both the novel and myself.” The reader had to wait several more years for the third book. The main character of the work, Grigory Melekhov, contrary to the author's urgent recommendations, did not come to true Bolshevism at all, but to his own home, to his son, to the land he had left.

The novel was finished in 1940. The novel, published as a separate edition in 1953, was mutilated by the editor's scissors: only in this, greatly "truncated" and "supplemented" form, it was allowed to the reader, and the author had to agree with the "editing". Not distorted by censorship and editorial interventions, Sholokhov saw the full text of his work printed only in 1980. In the collected works - fifty years after writing and four years before the end of life.

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov is a Russian prose writer of the 20th century. The future writer was born in the Cossack village of Veshenskaya on the Don, and the life of the Don Cossacks was the environment where he spent his childhood and youth. All this will later be reflected in his works. From his parents, Sholokhov adopted a love for the land, a sense of blood connection with it. The origin of Sholokhov was subsequently of great importance for Russian literature, because before him there was no writer in whose work the life, customs, characters and fate of the Cossacks, an estate that occupied a special place in the history of Russia, would be so vividly described. So, Pushkin in the novel "The Captain's Daughter" created images of the Yaik (now Ural) Cossacks, in Lermontov's story "The Fatalist" Kuban Cossacks are mentioned, Gogol in the story "Taras Bulba" depicts Zaporozhye Cossacks.

Sholokhov's official education is only four classes at the gymnasium. He acquired most of his knowledge by studying on his own. Mikhail was a capable young man, which allowed him to work at a fairly early age as a clerk and teacher in the village of Karginskaya. Terrible events in Russia - the First World War, the revolution and the Civil War - took place before his eyes, almost all this time he lived on the Don. In 1922, Sholokhov moved to Moscow to continue his studies, but he failed to enter an educational institution, and the young man made a choice that became decisive in his life: he began to engage in journalism and literature, at the same time earning a living as a laborer, loader, bricklayer. At the beginning of his literary career, Sholokhov worked in the most popular magazine "Young Guard", wrote feuilletons.

For three years, Mikhail Sholokhov has been writing stories, developing his own unique writing style within the framework of a realistic style. The first collection of works by Sholokhov " Don stories" was published in 1924, followed by another collection two years later - " Azure steppe". Sholokhov's talent immediately gained recognition due to his amazing skill for such a young writer in depicting the unity of nature, man, social life and national color. In his first stories, the merits of his poetics were manifested - rich, figurative language, relief characters of the characters, clearly written storylines. At the end of 1926, a rare event occurred in world literature: a twenty-one-year-old writer began to write the novel " Quiet Don”, in epic breadth, description of various characters and destinies surpassing contemporary literature.

The work was so stunned by its unexpectedness, the youth of the author, that there were even suspicions about the authenticity of Sholokhov's authorship, which were renewed from time to time, but serious arguments in favor of this version did not appear. The first volume of The Quiet Flows the Don was published in 1928. During 1929, in separate parts, Mikhail Sholokhov published a continuation of the novel, collected in the second volume. If the first two volumes of the novel were written in a single breath, they were based on recent impressions, then further work required the inclusion of the events of the Civil War in a broad context of historical time, to give them an artistic interpretation. With this circumstance, there is a break in work on the last parts of the novel. The third volume was completed only in 1932, the fourth - in 1940. "Quiet Flows the Don" is a grandiose panorama of historical events in Russia, from the First World War, revolutionary upheavals to the end of the Civil War. The novel reflects the historical fate of the whole people and the tragic personal fate of the Don Cossack Grigory Melekhov.

In addition to The Quiet Don, Sholokhov creates two more big novels about two events-tests that befell our people - the collectivization of agriculture and the Great Patriotic War. The first of these is the novel Upturned virgin soil»about the movement of "twenty-five thousand" workers sent to the Soviet countryside to help organize collective farms; The novel consists of two volumes, published in 1932 and 1959. And the second novel They fought for their country", started in 1942. The writer worked on it intermittently for twenty-seven years, but the novel remained unfinished. It is noteworthy that Sholokhov wrote his major works for a long time, sometimes their individual parts were separated by large periods of time. This is due not only to the fact that he wrote slowly - no, a responsible and exacting artist must write the truth, and Sholokhov was looking for it, trying to find the exact artistic word that could express this truth. The high talent of Sholokhov the prose writer was repeatedly awarded national prizes, and in 1965 the writer received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov reflected in his work the social changes in the history of Russia, in the center of which was a man. The conflict “individual and society”, traditional for social literature, in the writer’s work develops into a conflict that has become the leading one in the literature of the 20th century – the fate of a person against the backdrop of the grandiose catastrophes of time, the theme of personality and history. These conflicts are most clearly expressed in the story " The fate of man».

1. Introduction

2. Biography

3. The main features of creativity.

4. Quiet Don

5. Grigory Melekhov

6. Aksinya

7. Bolsheviks

8. "The fate of man"

9. The value of Sholokhov's work

10. Bibliography

Introduction

In the 1930s, the world-famous novels by M. Sholokhov "Quiet Flows the Don" and "Virgin Soil Upturned" (1st book) were published. Sholokhov is an outstanding writer of our country, the greatest master of artistic expression. His works are widely known both in our country and far beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.

“... A remarkable phenomenon in our literature is Mikhail Sholokhov,” said A. Tolstoy ... “He came to literature with the theme of the birth of a new society in the throes and tragedies of social struggle. In The Quiet Don, he unfolded an epic, saturated with the smells of the earth, a picturesque canvas from the life of the Don Cossacks. But this does not limit the larger theme of the novel:

“Quiet Flows the Don” in terms of language, cordiality, humanity, plasticity is a pan-Russian, national, folk work.

“Sholokhov's work is a masterful one,” A. V. Lunacharsky wrote about Virgin Soil Upturned. - A very large, complex, full of contradictions and rushing forward content is dressed here in a beautiful verbal figurative form ... "

Biography

Ikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov was born on May 24, 1905 on the Don, on the Kruzhilin farm, into a working-class family. He studied first at the parochial school, and then, until 1918, at the gymnasium. During the Civil War, Sholokhov lived on the Don, served in the food detachment, and participated in the fight against white gangs. In 1920 he created a Komsomol cell in one

from the stations. At the end of the war, Sholokhov worked as a bricklayer, a laborer, and an accountant. The literary activity of the writer began in 1923. In 1925, his first book, Don Stories, was published.

Sholokhov belongs to the generation of Soviet writers who were shaped by the revolution, civil war, and socialist construction.

A. Fadeev said it well: “When, after the end of the civil war, we began to converge from different parts of our vast Motherland - party, and even more non-party young people, we were amazed at how common our biographies were with the difference in individual destinies. Such was the path of Furmanov, the author of the book "Chapaev" ... Such was the path of the younger and, perhaps, the more talented Sholokhov among us ... We entered literature wave after wave, there were many of us. We brought our personal experience of life, our individuality. We were united by the feeling of the new world as our own and love for it.”

After the publication of the first stories, Sholokhov returned to the Don, to his native village. “I wanted to write about the people among whom I was born and whom I knew,” he recalled.

In 1926, Sholokhov began working on The Quiet Don. The first book of the novel was published in 1928, the second in 1929, the third in 1933, and the fourth in 1940. Already the first books of The Quiet Flows the Don made Sholokhov's name widely known.

Gorky and Serafimovich took an active part in the literary fate of Sholokhov. Serafimovich wrote a preface to the Don Stories. He was the first to note in the author an outstanding talent, knowledge of life, great visual power, vivid imagery of language. Gorky helped the writer print the third book of The Quiet Flows the Don, which some critics tried to discredit.

During the Great Patriotic War, Sholokhov was an active participant in the struggle of the Soviet people against the fascist invaders. He wrote a number of essays and the story The Science of Hate (1942). At the same time, Sholokhov began work on a novel about the Great Patriotic War, They Fought for the Motherland. Separate chapters were published in 1943-1944 and in 1949. They depict heavy heroic battles waged by the Soviet Army in the summer of 1942 on the distant approaches to Stalingrad.

A significant artistic achievement of the writer was the story "The Fate of a Man", printed on the pages

Pravda in 1957. The story quickly became known to the whole world. Based on it, the talented Soviet film director and actor S. Bondarchuk created a wonderful film under the same name.

In 1959, Sholokhov completed the second book of Virgin Soil Upturned, thus completing the entire novel as a whole.

For the first and second books of Virgin Soil Upturned, the writer was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1960. In 1965, Sholokhov was awarded the international Nobel Prize.

Currently, Sholokhov continues to work on the novel "They Fought for the Motherland."

The main features of creativity.

AT

All life and literary activity of Sholokhov is connected with the Don. The writer passionately loves his native places; in the life of the Don Cossacks, he draws themes, images, material for his works of art.

Sholokhov himself emphasized: “I was born on the Don, grew up there, studied, formed as a person and a writer and was brought up as a member of our great Communist Party and I am a patriot of my great, powerful Motherland. I am proud to say that I am also a patriot of my native Don region.”

Remarkable in brightness and strength, the artistic depiction of the life of the Don Cossacks is an important feature of Sholokhov's creative activity.

This does not mean at all that Sholokhov is a writer of some purely local, regional theme. On the contrary, on the material of the life and life of the Don Cossacks, he was able to reveal deep processes of broad historical significance. And here we should note the second most important feature of his work - the desire to artistically capture the turning, milestone periods in the life of our country, when the struggle of the new, socialist world against the old, bourgeois one appears in the most acute fierce and dramatic form. The Civil War (“Quiet Flows the Don”), collectivization (“Virgin Soil Upturned”) and the Great Patriotic War (“They Fought for the Motherland”, “The Fate of a Man”) are the three periods in the life of our people on which the artist’s attention is focused.

The third feature of Sholokhov's talent is connected with this - epic breadth, a penchant for monumental artistic canvases, for deep social generalizations, for raising big questions about the historical fate of the people.

The heroes of Sholokhov's works are ordinary working people. Their thoughts, sorrows and joys, their desire for happiness and justice, their struggle for a new life invariably interests the artist.

And, finally, it is necessary to note an essential feature of the writer's creative method - his dislike for any idealization of reality. Steadily follow the harsh truth of life, embody reality in all its contradictions, in all its complexity and versatility, in all its contrasts, without at all smoothing out the most intense sharpness of conflicts that arise in the difficult and complex process of the birth of a new, communist world, such. An artistic starting principle, which Sholokhov invariably adheres to.

Quiet Don

E

These principles, most fully manifested in the novel "Quiet Flows the Don", were already reflected in the first book of the writer - "Don Stories". The main theme of the stories is the class struggle on the Don. It is not family ties and feelings, but the place of people in the fierce class struggle that determines their relationship with each other. Often even fathers and children, siblings become mortal enemies. In the story "Kolovert", the old Cossack Kramskov and his two sons, who went to the Reds, are captured by the Whites. They are shot by their youngest son Mikhail, a white officer. In the story “Bakhchevnik”, the father is the commandant of the White Guard military court, an executioner and torturer, and his son Fyodor is a Red Army soldier. Fyodor, wounded in the leg, is pursued by the whites. The father discovers him in the melon and is going to deal with him. Then the youngest son Mitya, in order to save his brother, kills his father. In the story "Wormhole", the Komsomol member Styopka hates with a burning hatred his father Yakov Alekseevich the fist and the world-eater. In punishment for the fact that the bulls allegedly disappeared through the fault of Styopka, Yakov Alekseevich and his eldest son brutally kill a Komsomol member.

Drawing the furious anger of the enemies of the revolution, their bloody deeds, Sholokhov proves that, on the contrary, among the revolutionary Cossacks, who were forced to defend a new life in fierce battles, high and noble qualities were manifested - readiness for self-sacrifice, heroic courage and true humanity.

If in the "Don Tales" the struggle of classes was depicted mainly within the narrow limits of the Cossack family, then this theme is developed in a completely different way in "Quiet Don". The Quiet Flows the Don is one of the most outstanding works of Soviet fiction. M. I. Kalinin, in a conversation with young writers in 1934, said: “The Quiet Don” I consider our “best work of art. Some passages are written with exceptional force.”

A. M. Gorky attributed The Quiet Flows the Don to books that "gave a broad, truthful and most talented picture of the civil war."

Based on the best achievements of Soviet literature in depicting the civil war, Sholokhov managed to create a deeply innovative and original work.

In The Quiet Don, Sholokhov, first of all, appears before us as a master of epic narration. The artist unfolds a vast historical panorama of turbulent dramatic events widely and freely. "Quiet Flows the Don" covers a period of ten years, from 1912 to 1922.

Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984) - Russian prose writer, journalist, screenwriter. He received the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his contribution to world literature (the epic novel about the Russian Cossacks "Quiet Don"). In 1941 he became a laureate of the Stalin Prize, in 1960 - the Lenin Prize, in 1967 and 1980 - the Hero of Socialist Labor.

The future outstanding writer was born in 1905 (khutor Kruzhilin, Veshenskaya village) in a prosperous family, his father was a clerk of a commercial store and the manager of a steam mill, his mother was a Cossack by birth, she was a servant in the panorama estate Yasenevka, she was forcibly married to a Cossack stanitsa ataman Kuznetsova. After parting with him, Anastasia Chernyak began to live with Alexander Sholokhov, their son Mikhail was born out of wedlock and was called Kuznetsov (after her ex-husband), until they officially divorced, and she married Alexander Sholokhov in 1912.

After the head of the family got a new job in another village, the family moved to a new place of residence. Little Misha was taught to read and write by a local teacher invited to the house, in 1914 he began to study in the preparatory class of the Moscow Men's Gymnasium. 1915-1918 - studying at the gymnasium in the city of Boguchary (Voronezh province). In 1920, after the Bolsheviks came to power, the Sholokhovs moved to the village of Karginskaya, where his father became the head of a procurement office, and his son was in charge of office work in the village revolutionary committee. Having completed the Rostov tax courses, Sholokhov became a food inspector in the village of Bukanovskaya, where, as part of the food detachments, he participated in the food appraisal, was captured by Makhno. In September 1922, Mikhail Sholokhov was taken into custody, a criminal case was initiated against him, and even a court sentence was passed - execution, which was never carried out. Thanks to the intervention of his father, who paid a large bail for him and corrected his birth certificates, according to which he became a minor, he was released already in March 1923, having been sentenced to a year of corrective labor in a juvenile colony and sent to Bolshevo (Moscow region).

Having gone to the capital, Sholokhov tries to become a workers' faculty member, which he does not succeed, since he lacks work experience and the direction of the Komsomol organization. The future writer worked part-time as a laborer, attended various literary circles and training sessions, the teachers at which were well-known personalities such as Alexander Aseev, Osip Brik, Viktor Shklovsky. In 1923, the newspaper Yunosheskaya Pravda published the feuilleton "Test" by Sholokhov, and later several more works "Three", "The Government Inspector".

In the same year, after visiting his parents who lived in the village of Bukanovskaya, Sholokhov decided to propose to Lydia Gromoslavskaya. But convinced by the future father-in-law (the former stanitsa ataman) to “make a man out of him”, he does not marry Lydia, but her older sister, Maria, with whom they had four children in the future (two sons and two daughters).

At the end of 1924, the newspaper "Young Leninist" published Sholokhov's story "The Mole", which was included in the cycle of Don stories ("Shepherd", "Foal", "Family Man", etc.), later combined into collections "Don Stories" ( 1926), "Azure Steppe" (1926), "About Kolchak, nettles and other things" (1927). These works did not bring the author much popularity, but marked the advent of a new writer in Soviet Russian literature, able to notice and reflect in a vivid literary form important trends in the life of that time.

In 1928, living with his family in the village of Veshenskaya, Sholokhov began work on his most grandiose brainchild - the epic novel in four volumes, The Quiet Don, in which he reflected the fate of the Don Cossacks during the First World War and further civil bloodshed. The novel was published in 1940, was highly appreciated by both the country's party leadership and Comrade Stalin himself. During the Second World War, the novel was translated into many Western European languages ​​and gained great popularity not only in Russia, but also far beyond its borders. In 1965, Sholokhov was nominated for the Nobel Prize, and became the only Soviet writer to receive it with the personal approval of the then leadership of the Soviet Union. In the period from 1932 to 1959, Sholokhov wrote another of his famous novels in two volumes about collectivization, Virgin Soil Upturned, for which he received the Lenin Prize in 1960.

During the war years, Mikhail Sholokhov served as a war correspondent, at that difficult time for the country, many stories and novellas were written that described the fate of ordinary people who fell into the millstones of war: the stories "The Fate of a Man", "The Science of Hatred", the unfinished story "They fought for the motherland." Subsequently, these works were filmed and became a real classic of Soviet cinema, which made an indelible impression on the audience, striking them with their tragedy, humanity and unchanging patriotism.

In the post-war period, Sholokhov published a series of journalism "The Word about the Motherland", "Light and Darkness", "The Struggle Continues", etc. In the early 60s, he gradually moved away from literary activity, returned from Moscow to the village of Veshenskaya, went hunting and fishing. He gives all the awards he received for his literary achievements to the construction of schools in his native places. In the last years of his life, he was seriously ill and stoically endured the consequences of two strokes, diabetes, and, in the end, an oncological disease of the larynx - throat cancer. His earthly journey ended on February 21, 1984, his remains were buried in the village of Veshenskaya, in the courtyard of his house.