AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON (NEW RUSSIAN CLASSIC) BY MIKHAIL SHOLOKHOV

Book excerpt: AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY MIKHAIL SHOLOKHOV (ILLUSTRATED) From The Author Of Books Like : The Fate of a Man and Early Stories Судьба Человека The Don Flows Home to the Sea The Don Flows Home to the Sea, Vol 2 Virgin Soil Upturned Virgin Soil Upturned, Book 2 Tales of the Don They Fought for Their Country Тихий Дон. Том I Они сражались за Родину. Судьба человека Тихий Дон. Том II Hiljaa virtaa Don I-III Донские рассказы. Судьба человека Родинка Early Stories Наука ненависти. Судьба человека Den azurblå stäppen De stille Don, band 1 [De stille Don & Storm over Rusland] Нахаленок ABOUT THE BOOK : And Quiet Flows the Don or Quietly Flows the Don (Тихий Дон, lit. "The Quiet Don") is 4-volume epic novel by Russian writer Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. The 1st three volumes were written from 1925 to '32 & published in the Soviet magazine October in 1928–32. The 4th volume was finished in 1940. The English translation of the 1st three volumes appeared under this title in 1934. The novel is considered one of the most significant works of Russian literature in the 20th century. It depicts the lives & struggles of Don Cossacks during WWI, the Russian Revolution & Russian Civil War. In 1965, Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The authorship of the novel is contested by some literary critics & historians, who believe it wasn't entirely written by Sholokhov. However, following the discovery of the manuscript, the consensus is that the work is, in fact, Sholokhov’s. ABOUT THE AUTHOR : Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (1905-1984) was born in the land of the Cossacks, now known as the Kamenskaya region of the R.S.F.S.R. He attended several high schools until 1918. During the civil war he fought on the side of the revolutionaries, and in 1922 he moved to Moscow to become a journalist. There he published a number of short stories in newspapers. He made his literary debut in 1926 with a volume of stories, Donskie rasskazy (Tales from the Don), 1926, about the Cossacks of his native region, to which he had returned two years earlier. In the same year, 1926, Sholokhov began writing Tikhi Don (And Quiet Flows the Don), 1928-1940, which matured slowly and took him fourteen years to complete. Reminiscent of Tolstoy in its vividly realistic scenes, its stark character descriptions and, above all, its vast panorama of the revolutionary period, Sholokhov’s epic became the most read work of Soviet fiction. Deeply interested in human destinies which are played against the background of the transformations and troubles in Russia, he unites in his work the artistic heritage of Tolstoy and Gogol with a new vision introduced into Russian literature by Maxim Gorky. His other major work in the Don cycle, Podnyataya tselina (Virgin Soil Upturned), 1932 and 1959, deals in part with the collectivization of the Don area. There are a number of works such as the short story Sudba cheloveka (The Fate of a Man), 1957 – made into a popular Russian film – which treat the power and the resilience of human love under adversity. His collected works, Sobranie sochineny, were published in eight volumes between 1956 and 1960. In 1932 Sholokhov joined the Communist Party and, on several occasions, has been a delegate to the Supreme Soviets. In 1939 he became a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and later vice president of the Association of Soviet Writers. AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY MIKHAIL SHOLOKHOV (ILLUSTRATED)