Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov

In 1930, while Sholokhov was still at work on And Quiet Flows the Don, full-scale collectivization and dekulakization were sweeping the Don region. He began a new novel immediately, following events, as he put it, 'while their traces were still hot.' Originally titled With Blood and Sweat, Part One appeared in 1932 in the journal Novy Mir as Virgin Soil Upturned. The novel follows Semyon Davydov, a former sailor and factory worker sent to the village of Gremyachy Log as part of the Twenty-Five Thousander movement, who together with local Communist Makar Nagulnov and village council chairman Andrei Razmyotnov builds a collective farm. It was hailed as a model of socialist realism while also capturing the suffering and contradictions of collectivization without evasion.

Sholokhov completed Part Two just before the war, but the manuscript was lost in the 1942 bombing of Veshenskaya. He returned to the work in the early 1950s and published the second volume in 1959. The novel had taken 28 years. It won the Lenin Prize in 1960. Widely translated in China, Virgin Soil Upturned had a significant influence on Chinese socialist literature. A statue of Grandpa Shchukar, the novel's most beloved comic figure, was erected in Rostov-on-Don in 1981.

In the spring of 1933 Mikhail Sholokhov, a writer in his twenties living at Veshenskaya on the Don, could no longer stand what was happening in his district. Local officials straining to meet grain procurement targets were sweeping away the peasants' seed and food grain, and beatings, evictions into the winter cold and mock executions were being used against collective farmers who fell short of their quotas. On 4 and 16 April he sent Stalin two long letters, denouncing the methods of abuse used in the procurement campaign point by point, with names and dates, and asking that grain be sent to the starving Veshenskaya and Verkhne-Donskoy districts.

Stalin replied, and he acted. Grain aid amounting to well over a hundred thousand poods was allotted to the two districts, and an investigating commission under Shkiryatov was sent down; some officials were punished. But in his reply of 6 May Stalin countered that the writer saw only one side: the esteemed grain growers, he wrote, had waged a quiet war against Soviet power, a war by starvation.

This correspondence, published in full in the 1990s, is among the most dramatic documents to denounce procurement violence from inside the system, by name, to the supreme leader himself. The case of a loyal Soviet writer putting the system's violence on paper is cited as a key source in the standard works on the famine. In 1938, at the height of the Terror, Sholokhov again appealed directly to Stalin for local officials caught in a fabricated case run by the Rostov NKVD, and saved them.

On 23 June 1941, the day after the war began, Sholokhov spoke at a rally before the residents of the stanitsa of Vyoshenskaya, and in the first days of July he was called up for military service. From 1941 to 1945 he served as a war correspondent for Sovinformburo and the newspapers Pravda and Krasnaya Zvezda. He was posted to the Western Front (August–October 1941), the Southwestern Front (December 1941–January 1942), the Southern Front (January–September 1942), the Stalingrad Front (September 1942–May 1943), the Western Front again (May 1943–March 1945) and the 3rd Belorussian Front (March–May 1945), and in 1941 he received the rank of regimental commissar. He was demobilized in December 1945 with the rank of colonel.

He saw the devastation of the front at first hand along the Don, his own country. In February 1942, flying to Kuybyshev at the summons of the head of Sovinformburo, his bomber overturned on landing: four people were killed and Sholokhov himself suffered a severe concussion. In June of that year his mother, Anastasia Danilovna, was killed in the yard of his own house during the bombing of Vyoshenskaya.

The signature work of the war years is the short story 'Nauka nenavisti' ('The Science of Hatred'), written at Kamyshin in June 1942. Pravda published it on 22 June, the first anniversary of the war's outbreak, deliberately timing the publication to that date, and Krasnaya Zvezda reprinted it the next day. In May 1943 the two papers published the first three chapters of the unfinished novel They Fought for Their Country across several issues; excerpts from that novel appeared again in 1942–1944, 1949 and 1969.

During the war Sholokhov gave the Stalin Prize he had received for And Quiet Flows the Don to the Soviet defence fund, and then bought four rocket launchers for the front with his own money. He was also awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class, and the medals 'For the Defence of Moscow', 'For the Defence of Stalingrad' and 'For the Victory over Germany'. After the war he finished the second book of Virgin Soil Upturned, continued work on They Fought for Their Country and wrote the story 'The Fate of a Man'.

From around the age of twenty Sholokhov began writing And Quiet Flows the Don, an epic of Don Cossack life through revolution and civil war, completing it in four volumes between 1928 and 1940. Centred on Grigory Melekhov, a Cossack who joins the Whites and is destroyed, the novel faces squarely even the tragedy of those who stood on the revolution's enemy side, and is counted the boldest epic to emerge within the frame of Soviet literature. Through censorship battles and attacks from the RAPP camp Stalin allowed the novel to be published, while accusations of plagiarism, on the claim that so young a writer could not have produced such a work, pursued it from the start.

The plagiarism charge was revived in the Cold War by Solzhenitsyn among others, but in 1999 the Russian Academy of Sciences recovered and authenticated the manuscript drafts of the first two volumes, and stylometric studies have likewise supported Sholokhov's authorship. The prevailing scholarly conclusion today is that the charge is unfounded.

In 1965 the Swedish Academy awarded Sholokhov the Nobel Prize in Literature for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he had given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people. He was the only Soviet writer to receive the prize with his government's blessing. In his later years he spoke as a hardliner, delivering a harsh denunciation of Sinyavsky and Daniel at the time of their trial, which left a shadow on his reputation. He never left Veshenskaya, and gave his Nobel money to build a school in his home district.