Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich

Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 1905-84, Russian novelist. Sholokhov won international fame for an epic novel of his native land, The Silent Don (4 vol., 1928-40; tr. in 2 vol., And Quiet Flows the Don, 1934, and The Don Flows Home to the Sea, 1941). The work, which won a Stalin Prize in 1941, describes the effect of World War I, the revolution, and the civil war on the lives of the Don Cossacks. A propagandistic novel, Virgin Soil Upturned, deals with the collectivization of agriculture; it won a Lenin Prize in 1960. Its first volume is Seeds of Tomorrow (1932-33, tr. 1959), and the second is Harvest on the Don (1960, tr. 1960). Sholokhov was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature, being the first officially sanctioned Soviet laureate.

(born May 24, 1905, Veshenskaya, Russia—died Feb. 21, 1984, Veshenskaya, U.S.S.R.) Russian novelist. A native of the Don River region, he served in the Red Army and joined the Communist Party in 1932. He is best known for the huge novel The Quiet Don, translated in two parts as And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) and The Don Flows Home to the Sea (1940). A portrayal of the struggle between the Cossacks and Bolsheviks, it was heralded in the Soviet Union as a powerful example of Socialist Realism and became the most widely read novel in Russia. It became controversial when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others alleged that it was plagiarized from the Cossack writer Fyodor Kryukov (d. 1920). Sholokhov's later novels include Virgin Soil Upturned (1932–60). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965.

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The Don (Дон) is one of the major rivers of Russia. It rises in the town of Novomoskovsk 60 kilometres southeast from Tula, southeast of Moscow, and flows for a distance of about 1,950 kilometres (1,220 mi) to the Sea of Azov.

From its source, the river first flows southeast to Voronezh, then southwest to its mouth. The main city on the river is Rostov on Don, its main tributary, the Donets.

History

In antiquity, the river was viewed as the border between Europe and Asia. In the Book of Jubilees, it is mentioned as being part of the border, beginning with its westernmost point up to its mouth, between the allotment of Japheth to the north and that of Shem to the south, sons of Noah. During the times of the old Scythians it was known in Greek as the Tanaïs, and has been a major trading route ever since.

Tanais appears in ancient Greek sources as the name of the river and of a city on it, situated in the Maeotian marshes. The name derives however from Scythian Iranic Dānu "river", akin to modern Ossetic don "river".

At its easternmost point, the Don comes near the Volga, and the Volga-Don Canal (length ca. 105 kilometres (65 mi)), connecting both rivers, is a major waterway. The Khazar fortress of Sarkel used to dominate this point in the Middle Ages. This part of the river saw heavy fighting during Operation Uranus, one of the turning point of the Second World War.

The Don has given its name to the Don Cossacks who settled the fertile valley of the river in the 16th and 17th centuries. In modern literature, the Don figures centrally in the works of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, a writer from the stanitsa of Veshenskaya.

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