Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (11(24).05.1905 – 21.02.1984) – Soviet writer, author of the novels And Quiet Flows the Don, Virgin Soil Upturned, the unfinished epic They Fought for the Motherland, Nobel Prize laureate, deputy, Stalin Prize laureate, academician, twice Hero of Socialist Labor.

He was born on 11 (24) May 1905 on the Kruzhilin farmstead.

Sholokhov’s autobiography takes up a page and a half: “born into the family of an employee of a trading enterprise in one of the farmsteads,” “studied in Moscow for two or three years,” and so on.

At the height of the Civil War, he witnessed the tragic events on the Don: military actions between the White Cossacks and the Reds unfolded before his eyes, and the Cossacks’ struggle for independence, which ended in the Upper Don Uprising, was under way.

By the early 1920s he already had experience as a food commissar, a writer of agitational plays, and a worker in a revolutionary committee; with such a background he appeared in Moscow. There he joined the literary association “Young Guard,” which existed under the auspices of RAPP, and in 1923 made his debut with a feuilleton in the newspaper Juvenile Truth. Sholokhov’s Don Stories (1926), works about the clash between White Cossacks and the Reds, about the fratricidal struggle on the Don, were written in a different vein. In these stories, obsession with class violence led to parricide (Bakhchevik), filicide (Birthmark), and deadly enmity between brothers (Koloverty). The Science of Hatred made neighbors kill one another over a pot of cabbage soup and a jug of milk (Aleshkino Heart). Sholokhov did not romanticize violence, did not sing of “Russia washed in blood” — he brought into literature the harsh, cruel truth about the Civil