And Quiet Flows the Don
by Mikhail Sholokhov
Summary
Grigory Melekhov is a young Don Cossack whose family carries a tellingly foreign nickname, the Turks, from an ancestor who married a captive bride generations earlier, and Sholokhov follows him from a reckless love affair with his neighbor's wife, Aksinia, through an arranged marriage to Natalya that never displaces her, across the full length of the First World War and the Russian Civil War that follows it. Grigory once saves the very husband he has wronged during fighting on the Austro-Hungarian front, a debt neither man ever quite discusses, and that tangle of loyalty and betrayal only deepens once the war at home begins.
The civil war pulls Grigory between the Reds and the Whites more than once, and Sholokhov gives him no fixed political conviction to explain the switching, only exhaustion, local loyalty and the accident of which army happens to be nearest. Natalya dies attempting to end a pregnancy she cannot face, and Aksinia, left to raise Grigory's children herself, eventually agrees to run away with him once the fighting leaves them no other path forward together. She is killed by a stray bullet during a skirmish with Red cavalry before they can reach safety, and Grigory buries her with his own hands, then walks home alone, his future, like the country's, entirely unsettled.
Sholokhov writes the Don steppe, its horses, its folk songs and its brutal, close quarters combat with a physical authority that contemporaries compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace, and the novel refuses to grant either the Reds or the Whites a clean moral advantage over the other. It suits a reader prepared for a long, densely populated epic that follows an entire Cossack community rather than a single hero, and its refusal to resolve Grigory's story into either victory or redemption is exactly what critics still point to as its most honest choice.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Mikhail Sholokhov the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he gave expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people, honoring a novel published across the 1920s and 1930s, with its final volume completed in 1940, that the Soviet government celebrated as the prize was announced even as some Western critics called the choice politically convenient. Accusations that Sholokhov had plagiarized the manuscript from a lesser known Cossack writer, Fyodor Kryukov, followed him for decades.
A Soviet investigation in the 1920s cleared Sholokhov of the charge, though that inquiry answered to the same government eager to claim him as its own writer. A more independent case for his authorship arrived in the 1990s, after hundreds of pages of 1920s drafts surfaced in 1987, 605 of them in his own hand, and the Russian Academy of Sciences examined them in 1999, showing exactly the kind of extensive revision a plagiarist copying someone else's finished text would have had no reason to make. The novel has since been filmed four times and adapted into a 1935 opera by Ivan Dzerzhinsky.