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p “The soft breath of the sun-warmed black earth could not stifle the finer perfume of the fading steppe violets. They grew on a stretch of abandoned fallow, popping up among the dry stalks of hart’s-clover, spreading in a colourful pattern over the edges of an old field balk; and even on the flintily hard virgin soil their blue, childishly clear eyes looked out on the world from the withered grass of the previous year. The violets had lived their appointed time in this lonely and spacious steppe, and in their place, on the slope of the ravine, marvellously brilliant tulips were already rising, lifting their crimson, white, and yellow chalices to the sun, while the wind blended the varied perfumes of the flowers and carried them far over the steppe" (4, 641-642).  [13•* 

p Just such images of the faraway Don steppes must have sprung to the young Sholokhov’s mind when he was working on his first stories in Moscow. The title he gave to his collected early short stories, The Azure Steppe, was most appropriate. On the Don they call the tulip the “azure flower”. It was a simple image that conjured up his beloved, unforgettable native Don region.

p “I wanted to write about the people I was born among and whom I knew,” he was later to say.

p These words do not only apply to And Quiet Flows the Don. All Sholokhov’s works are deeply rooted in the soil of his native Don region.

p Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov was born on Kruzhilino farmstead, Veshenskaya village, on May 24, 1905.

p “I was born and bred on the Don. It was there that I was formed as a man and a writer, and was educated 14 as a member of our great Communist Party. I am a patriot of my great, mighty country, and I am also proud to declare myself a patriot of my native Don region.” Sholokhov spoke these words at a meeting with voters in 1937.  [14•* 

p Sholokhov’s mother, Anastasia Danilovna Chernikova, came from a peasant family.

p “I knew and loved the writer’s mother well,” A. Plotkin, who worked in Veshenskaya region at the time of the collectivisation, wrote in his memoirs. “She was a simple, modest old lady... always busy with something or other.... She was quiet and inconspicuous but very friendly. She always had a greeting and a kind word for everyone.”

p A. S. Serafimovich, a prominent Soviet writer, who stayed with Sholokhov at Veshenskaya, wrote: “His mother is a wonderful person, completely illiterate but with a strong, lively, penetrating mind. In order to be able to write to her son she set to and taught herself to read and write. There followed a happy correspondence between mother and son. Obviously he inherited from her the precious creative gift that made him a great writer.”  [14•**  She died during an air raid in 1942, when the nazis bombed the village of Veshenskaya.

p His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Sholokhov, came from Ryazan gubernia. His son describes how he “sowed corn on bought Cossack land, served as a farm bailiff, as manager of a steam-mill and so on”. He died in 1926.

p Young Mikhail went to the parish school first. “Without finishing the school in Karginovo, I enrolled in a preparatory class at a Moscow lycee.... I studied for two or three years in Moscow, then continued at the Boguchary lycee. In 1918, I attended school here in Veshenskaya for a few months. In all I managed to complete four forms of high school.”  [14•*** 

p When the Civil War broke out Sholokhov exchanged his high-school studies for education in the hard school of life, in the fierce dramatic class struggle on the Don.

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p The fifteen-year-old boy joined a food supply detachment. At that time these detachments had to wage a stubborn struggle against the kulaks, who, relying on the support of armed bands, were hiding their crops in an effort to starve out the young Soviet Republic. “From 1920 I had a long period of service in a food detachment, travelling all over the Don region,” Sholokhov wrote in his autobiography. “I chased White bands, who were in control of the region up to 1922, and they were chasing us. Naturally it involved getting into all sorts of scrapes....”

p Sholokhov’s early works—Alien Blood, The Food Commissar, and especially Paths and Roads, show just what sort of “scrapes” a young commissar could get into in those years. There was the constant danger of being struck down by a kulak bullet fired from round a corner, or of a sudden bandit attack. K. Potapov tells how Sholokhov was taken prisoner in a battle with members of Makhno’s band near Konkovo farmstead. He was “interrogated by Makhno himself, and only escaped being shot because of his youth. Makhno promised him he would be hung should their paths ever cross again. The young Sholokhov took part in battles against Fomin’s band, whom he was later to describe in And Quiet Flows the Don."  [15•* 

p Thus Sholokhov gained his early experience of the fierce, cruel class struggle on the Don, which provided so much of the subject-matter of his early stories and was to be expressed so powerfully in And Quiet Flows the Don.

p The Civil War over, Sholokhov came to Moscow towards the end of 1922. What was it that prompted the seventeenyear-old youth to leave his home for the capital? Was he attracted by the recently opened workers’ faculties? Or was it his dream of becoming a writer, the brave decision to launch out on that path that brought him hardwon happiness, world fame and the inevitable bitterness of many a hard blow?

p In 1922 Sholokhov could hardly have imagined that his dream of becoming a writer might have any chance of coming true. When he arrived in Moscow the city was only just beginning to get over hunger and destruction, and 16 the turmoil of the Revolution and the Civil War years. The NEP (New Economic Policy) period had just begun: privately owned restaurants and night clubs had opened, the “champions of free enterprise" walked around in expensive overcoats, their women in furs, and profiteers sold French perfumes and silk stockings, while long queues of unemployed formed outside the labour exchanges. There were violent contrasts at every turn.

p Sholokhov’s first impressions of this Moscow were reflected to some extent in his feuilleton “Three”, published on October 30,1923, in the newspaper Yunosheskaya Pravda.

p The young man had a hard time in Moscow at first. He had to find a job to support himself, so he went to the labour exchange. I. Eksler describes how the young Sholokhov applied for work: “This young fellow in a tall grey sheepskin hat turned up at the labour exchange in Malaya Bronnaya Street. When asked his profession, he replied ’food commissar’.”  [16•* 

p But the period of war communism was over and food commissars were no longer required. Sholokhov went to work as a loader, a navvy, a clerk and so on.

p At the same time he began to write for a youth newspaper. His article “Ordeal” appeared in Yunosheskaya Pravda (then the official organ of the Komsomol Central Committee and Moscow Committee) on September 19, 1923, to be followed shortly after by “Three”, and later “The Inspector”, published at the beginning of 1924. Sholokhov’s first attempts as a writer are of scarce literary importance in themselves and consequently do not appear in the writer’s collected works. Yet even so, there were passages which testified to the young man’s talent and fine powers of observation.

p Sholokhov’s career as a writer can be said to begin properly on December 14, 1924, with the publication of his story The Birth-Mark in Molodoi Leninets. The many stories later to be gathered together in the collections Tales from the Don and The Azure Steppe began to appear separately on the pages of various newspapers and magazines (including Komsomoliya, Prozhektor, Smena, and Ogonyok).

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p The collection Tales from the Don, published by the Novaya Moskva Publishing House in Moscow in 1926, carried a foreword by A. S. Serafimovich.

p Serafimovich became Sholokhov’s “literary godfather”. Moreover, the two struck up a firm and lasting friendship. The older writer took a direct interest in the first book of And Quiet Flows the Don, and when it was published was the first to congratulate the young writer on his success in an article in Pravda, which extolled Sholokhov’s talent and contained many penetrating observations about his work.

p Sholokhov was all the more grateful for the support of such an experienced writer in that on the whole he received very little attention from his fellow writers at this stage.

In an article for Serafimovich’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1938 Sholokhov wrote: “I am truly obliged to Serafimovich, for it was he who first supported me at the very beginning of my literary career, who first recognised and encouraged me.... I will never forget how in 1925, on reading my first collection of stories, Serafimovich wrote an enthusiastic foreword, and even wanted to meet me. Our first meeting took place at the First House of Soviets. Serafimovich assured me that I must continue to write and study. He told me to work very carefully on everything, and never to hurry. I have always endeavoured to follow this advice.”  [17•* 

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p Sholokhov began his career as a writer at a very significant moment in Soviet literature. A whole stream of young people were returning from the Civil War and entering the literary scene. They produced a flood of works that gave the new Soviet literature a fine reputation.

p The representatives of the generation that had borne all the hardships of the Civil War on their shoulders were turning to literature still in their military greatcoats so to speak, and bringing to it “the whiff of grapeshot" they 18 had themselves experienced, the thunder of recent battles. Together they were creating a great epic of the October Revolution and the Civil War.

p At the end of the twenties books by Soviet writers (Chapayev, The Iron Flood, Cities and Years, The Rout, The Badgers, the first books of And Quiet Flows theDon, and so on) began to appear in translation abroad, where they had a strange attraction even for the bourgeois reader.

p This was of course not due to startlingly new literary devices, which were the basis of so many fashionable modernist trends. Nor was it due to the exceptional biographies of the writers, who were for the most part very young, although there was obviously a certain glamour in the idea of fame having come to a twenty-fouryear-old youth who had taken part in the Civil War on the Don (Sholokhov), and a twenty-eight-year-old man who had fought as a partisan in the Far East (Fadeyev). But the main factor which accounted for their immense popularity was the books themselves, the life which they described.

p They opened wide the door on the “mysterious” world of revolutionary Russia, with its battles that decided the fate of whole nations and states, the heroic deeds of the masses, the proud awareness of the importance of the victories gained, the unprecedented hardships, hunger and destruction, the bitter dramas and tragedies, inevitable in the great revolutionary upheaval which ushered in a new stage in the history of the world.

p “When I was young and just setting out to become a writer—that is at the end of the twenties,” wrote the Dutch writer Theun de Vries, “a German publishing house put out, apparently for the first time in Western Europe, a series which struck our imagination and our hearts. They were stories and novels by young Soviet writers who were themselves among the ranks of the revolutionary people and showed the world that race of new, strong fighters, who were sometimes rough but always healthy—the fighters and builders of socialism. There were the novels of Fedin, Gladkov, Fadeyev, Leonov, and Sholokhov. Ever since I have been very much under the influence of this new literature. It helped me form my own views on man and society. It forced me to 19 recognise those social forces of which I had had only a very vague idea previously.”  [19•* 

p Indeed, if we turn to the period in our literature Theun de Vries is referring to, we will find two words on the literary banners of the time: “Revolution and Man.” The efforts of a whole generation of Soviet writers were turned towards understanding and interpreting the Revolution and the place in it and the attitude towards it of people of the most varied backgrounds.

p “The war and the Revolution were our most important emotional experience. The single aim of our lives was to express this experience in art,” Fedin wrote years later.  [19•** 

p The exceptional nature of the historical process underway, the simple fact that for the first time in history the masses were reorganising life in their own interests, was in itself enough to stimulate writers to conduct a ceaseless search for new methods. For if it were to remain faithful to life and “read the book of life" correctly, literature had to find new methods, new principles for creating works on a level with the age. The writers who nursed the new literature through its infancy had only recently been soldiers, and they were very bold in their thinking. For them literature was more than a vehicle for self-expression. They saw their high calling in terms of service to the people. It is clear from numerous statements made on the subject that they aimed to create a heroic literature, worthy of the people who had made the Revolution.

p At a meeting in Paris in April 1949, Alexander Fadeyev said: “When the Civil War came to an end and we began to congregate from every corner of our vast country—young Party men, and even more non-Party men—we were amazed to find how similar the paths we had traversed were despite our very different circumstances. This went for Furmanov, the author of Chapayev, and for the young Mikhail Sholokhov, who was possibly the most gifted of us—We came into literature wave upon wave, bringing our personal experience and our individuality. We were united by a sense of the new world being our own, and by our love for it.”  [19•*** 

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p This sense of the world he lived in and wrote about being his own, and love for it, permeates all Sholokhov’s early writings and indeed all his later works too.

p Almost all the Tales from the Don are based on Sholokhov’s personal experience in the establishment of Soviet power on the Don.

p Tales from the Don were almost lost to the general public. The book was reprinted in 1931 in a very small edition (5,500 copies), and twenty-five years were to elapse before they were published again. Sholokhov himself was largely responsible for this. He considered them to be of scant literary value and was strongly opposed to their publication.

p Now that the stories formerly gathered together under the titles Tales from the Don and The Azure Steppe have appeared in the first volume of the collected works of Sholokhov, the reader can see for himself how unjust the author was in judging them so severely. True, there are clumsy, rough passages, and some that jar somewhat. But the youthful freshness and the dramatic force of the conflicts and passions cannot fail to captivate the reader.

p The young writer carefully examined the radical changes that the Revolution had wrought in the life of the Cossacks and tried to perceive the new features of life and people’s characters.

p At the same time Sholokhov’s stories helped to dispel that false-romantic impression of revolutionary struggle, with “heroes” effortlessly overcoming their enemies, which was a feature of so many works written about the Civil War at that time. The writer showed the harsh reality of the fierce struggle that went on in the Cossack stanitsas both during the Civil War and in the first years of peace when Soviet power was being established on the Don. The Revolution affected the life of the people down to the very roots, dividing families and setting brother against brother, son against father. In The Birth-Mark the ataman of a White band kills his son who is in command of a Red Army cavalry troop. The Red Army man Shibalok kills the woman he loves when he learns that she has passed information to the Whites (Shibalok’s Seed). Two brothers kill their father who had headed a drumhead court-martial which had sentenced Red Army prisoners to death (Melon Field Keeper). Kramskov, 21 a White officer, has his father and brother, who are fighting in the Red Guards, shot (Vortex).

p Tales from the Don literally reeks of powder and blood, so fierce is the struggle the writer depicts.

p Many of the features of Sholokhov’s talent which he was later to develop more fully are already present in these early stories. Sholokhov transmits the drama of the class struggle through poignant situations, where friends and even kinsfolk find themselves on opposite sides of the fence, thus showing the Revolution as a social upheaval of colossal magnitude affecting every aspect of human relationships.

p One of the epic themes of world literature of the past was expressed with particular poignancy in Tales from the Don. Sholokhov penetrated life’s small backwaters, and carefully examined the relationship between man and property, and how this affected people’s character and psychology. And from the very start we observe that powerful motif which was to run through all Sholokhov’s works: his rejection of a world based on blind egoism, inequality, the power of money, and the laws of the jungle.

p The stories often centre on a struggle between two radically opposed forces: the conflict between people of the emergent world of socialism and those who cling tenaciously to the past—the kulaks and the whiteguards. Sholokhov sees the actual struggle he is depicting so dramatically as an expression of the conflict between irreconcilable principles: humanism, and care for the welfare and happiness of the recently disinherited, on the one hand, and the savage tenacity of people who will stop at nothing to retain their privileges, wealth and possessions, on the other.

p The characters of the people building Soviet power on the Don were formed in the crucible of ceaseless struggle with the class enemy, now latent, now exploding in a new fierce burst. The young author gave all his love and sympathy to these people. There is Yefim, a Red Army man and former shepherd, responsive to other people’s griefs, mortal enemy of the kulaks “whose day is done" (Mortal Enemy); Grigory, a young orphan, a herdsman, then a Komsomol member, who longs to study so as to be able to govern “our republic" (The Herdsman); Petka 22 Kremnev, secretary of a Komsomol cell, who bravely takes upon himself all the most difficult and dangerous tasks (Paths and Roads); and the amiable Foma Korshunov (The Bastard).

p For all their differences in age, character and experience, these people all have one thing in common: the Revolution has inspired them all to take part in building a new life.

p In Tales from the Don Sholokhov gave a genuine, authentic account of the fierce class struggle which continued on the Don after the Civil War was over, an account that is imbued with confidence in the inevitable triumph of the new.

There are strong connecting links between Tales from the Don and Sholokhov’s novels. Some of the stories are closer to And Quiet Flows the Don, others to Virgin Soil Upturned, but for all the difference in their literary worth they represent a good running start to a life of great creative achievement.

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