And Quiet Flows the Don

Voorkant
David Rehak, 5 mrt 2016 - 650 pagina's

And Quiet Flows the Don is the great classic monumental novel so favorably compared to Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Like the Tolstoy novel, And Quiet Flows the Don is an epic picture of Russian life during a time of crisis and examines it through political, military, romantic, and civilian lenses. It took fourteen years to complete. Earning the Stalin Prize, it became the most-read work of Soviet fiction, selling ten million copies. It even won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The story traces the progress of the cossack Gregor Melekhov from youthful lover to Red Army soldier.

Various modern Russian novelists have been hailed as successors to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky but here is the first one who merits the distinction, and who at the same time is modern, original and universal enough in appeal to catch the imagination of the American reading public.

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Over de auteur (2016)

For decades a pillar of the Soviet literary establishment, Sholokhov owes his stature to And Quiet Flows the Don (1928--40), a four-volume epic of the life and fate of the Don Cossacks in the Revolution and civil war. Although himself a party member, Sholokhov depicts fairly impartially both sides in the conflict between the Reds and the Whites and shows how his hero, Grigory Melekhov, is driven by background and fate from one camp to the other. This realistic novel captures the exotic Cossack milieu superbly, and the whole works on a scale unseen since Tolstoy's War and Peace. Among Sholokhov's later works, Virgin Soil Upturned (1932--60), which deals with the collectivization of agriculture, deserves particular mention; the first volume is far more direct and honest than the much-later second volume. Over the years, Sholokhov's authorship of And Quiet Flows the Don has been questioned, most recently by Solzhenitsyn, but Sholokhov has had strong defenders in both the Soviet Union and the West. His political stance accounts for part of the anger directed against him. Extremely conservative, Sholokhov made vicious attacks on dissidents and the West and, aside from his concern for environmental issues, was a devoted follower of the party line. Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965.

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