Mikhail Sholokhov

Lore & Background

Mikhail Sholokhov was a Russian novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965, known for chronicling the lives of Don Cossacks during the Russian Revolution, civil war, and collectivization. He was born in the Kruzhilin hamlet within the stanitsa Vyoshenskaya, in the region of the Don Cossack Host. His father was a Russian of the lower middle class who worked as a farmer, cattle trader, and miller, while his mother, of Ukrainian peasant origin, was the widow of a Cossack and learned to read later in life to correspond with her son. Sholokhov’s family were not Cossacks but inogorodnye ("outlanders"), a term for outsiders who settled along the Don; they were generally poorer than the Cossacks and excluded from voting in the Host government.

He attended schools in various locations until 1918, when at age 13 he joined the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, fighting for several years. He began writing at 17, and his first published work was a satirical article, The Test (19 October 1923). After moving to Moscow in 1922, he worked as a stevedore, stonemason, and accountant while attending writers’ seminars.

In 1924 he returned to Veshenskaya to write full-time and married Maria Petrovna Gromoslavskaia, daughter of a village ataman; they had four children. His first book, Tales from the Don (1926), drew on his wartime experiences. He then spent fourteen years writing And Quiet Flows the Don, which earned the Stalin Prize in 1941. Another novel, Virgin Soil Upturned, took 28 years and won a Lenin Prize, reflecting collectivization in the Don area and becoming a model of socialist realism.

Reader's Guide

Sholokhov’s work is defined by his deep focus on the Don Cossacks, a community he observed from the perspective of an outsider, as his family were inogorodnye (non-Cossack settlers) who were poorer and excluded from local governance. His most famous novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, took fourteen years to complete and earned him the State Stalin Prize. It depicts Cossack life before and during World War I and the Russian Civil War. His other major novel, Virgin Soil Upturned, composed over twenty-eight years, portrays life during collectivization in the Don region and was celebrated as a key example of socialist realism, later influencing Chinese socialist literature.

His short story “The Fate of a Man” was adapted into a popular film. During World War II, he wrote about the Soviet war effort and the destruction along the Don, where his mother was killed in a bombing. An unfinished novel, They Fought for Their Country, also addresses the war.

Sholokhov’s authorship of And Quiet Flows the Don was repeatedly challenged, with accusations that he plagiarized a manuscript from a dead White officer. He defended his work by submitting his own manuscripts to a commission, which ruled in his favor. The debate persisted, with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn among the accusers, but a 1984 statistical analysis of sentence lengths supported Sholokhov’s authorship. His collected works were published in eight volumes, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965.

Did You Know?

• Vladimir Stavsky visited Mikhail Sholokhov on 16 September 1937.
• After visiting Sholokhov, Stavsky wrote a personal report to Stalin accusing Sholokhov of being 'politically misguided'.