Marking the 115th anniversary of Mikhail Sholokhov. The world honors the writer "for the artistic power and integrity of the epic about the Don Cossacks at a turning point in Russia"

May 24, 2020 marks the 115th anniversary of the birth of Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov (1905–1984), the only Soviet writer whose Nobel Prize was awarded by the USSR leadership. The writer received it in 1965 "for the artistic power and integrity of the epic about the Don Cossacks at a crucial time for Russia". The Presidential Library’s portal provides rare materials that reveal the depth and magnitude of the problems he raised. The electronic collections of the library contain lifetime editions of the writer's works, literary studies and his photo portraits.

The main milestones of Sholokhov’s creative fate are scrupulously traced by Isaiah Lezhnev in the book Mikhail Sholokhov, published in 1941 on the very eve of World War II. It reveals the story of the creation of the novel "And Quiet Flows the Don", which has become one of the largest literary events of the twentieth century. “Sholokhov decided to write the history of the Cossacks of our era, the artistic encyclopedia of the former Cossack estate”, - writes Lezhnev. The reality of the 1920s brought this plan to the young Cossack, in relation to which he was by no means an outside observer.

Sholokhov was born in 1905 on the farm Kruzhilin (now Kruzhilinsky) of the Vyoshenskaya village of the former region of the Don Army. When the boy grew up, his father drove him to the city to study, and an illiterate mother, yearning for her son, herself learned to read and write to be able to correspond with him. The village woman intuitively felt the talent growing in him.

The future writer studied until the time when the civil war came to the Don Cossack villages.

He came to Moscow at 18. After the collection of “Don Stories” published in 1925, he, a participant in the battles, wanted to try to figure out the war that had stunned on the Don. In 1926, he sat down to write "And Quiet Flows the Don". To work on the novel, silence and native places were needed - and Mikhail Alexandrovich returned to the Don, to the village of Vyoshenskaya.

When the young writer in 1927 sent the first volume of "And Quiet Flows the Don", to the editorial office of the October magazine, they reacted rather coolly to the manuscript. “In the literary milieu, Sholokhov was met unfriendly”, - we read in the publication Mikhail Sholokhov mentioned above. - His first books were subjected to the most severe attacks.

But since the novel was about Cossacks, and the honorary editor of the October magazine were A. S. Serafimovich, who was originally from a Cossack family, it was he who was given the manuscript of 20 copyright sheets for final conclusion.

A huge literary event was the sudden appearance of the first two books of such an outstanding work. This gave some fellow writers a reason to doubt: a novel of such scale and strength could not, in their opinion, be written by a 23-year-old boy from a deaf Don village with four classes of gymnasium education.

The situation around the novel by the summer of 1931 was alarming, because the United State Political Administration, of course, also read the manuscript of the sixth part of And Quiet Flows the Don. Heinrich Yagoda, the first ever general commissioner of state security, at a meeting - as Sholokhov himself said - simply “friendly” said to him: “But you are against!” With his bare truth about the difficult choice of the Cossacks at a sharp historical turning point, Sholokhov challenged the entire repressive apparatus. This could at any moment end with the arrest and death of a genius writer.

Gorky helped, recognizing that And Quiet Flows the Don is a “work of high dignity”, spotlighting the heroism and tragedy of the Cossacks.

Sholokhov's short stories and novels are a single epic canvas about the fate of the people at different stages of the revolutionary path. After the Don Stories, the central link was And Quiet Flows the Don, followed by Harvest on the Don. A new shock for the writer was the story of the publication in 1969 of fresh chapters from the novel "They Fought for the Homeland". The truth told about the repressions of 1937 did not suit the authorities. But after a meeting with L. I. Brezhnev, the chapters were printed in Pravda newspaper.

The theme of war in Sholokhov’s books has always been contrasted with the measured and wise course of national life, the symbol of which was for the writer his own majestic Quiet Don.