Mikhail Sholokhov (SHAWL-eh-kawf) published collections of short stories, Donskiye rasskazy and Lazorevaya Step, in 1926. In 1931, Lazorevaya Step was expanded to include Donskiye rasskazy and was translated in 1961 as Tales from the Don. His short stories form volume 1 of his complete works, Sobranie sochinenii (1956-1960; Collected Works in Eight Volumes, 1984), which were first published in Moscow in eight volumes; war stories and essays form volume 8. They also are available in English as One Man’s Destiny, and Other Stories, Articles, and Sketches, 1923-1963 (1967) and At the Bidding of the Heart: Essays, Sketches, Speeches, Papers (1973).

Mikhail Sholokhov occupies a unique place in Soviet literature as the author of The Silent Don, the greatest novel to be published in the Soviet Union. He has been compared to Leo Tolstoy in his creation of a national epic, to Fyodor Dostoevski in his portrayal of Grigorii Melekhov, and to Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov in his evocations of the steppe. In 1965, he was permitted by Soviet authorities to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, a privilege denied to Boris Pasternak, who wrote a more profoundly philosophical novel. In addition, Sholokhov held numerous positions of honor in the Communist Party and the Union of Soviet Writers. He won the Stalin and Lenin prizes for literature (1941, 1960) and received honorary degrees from Western and Soviet universities.

In his two major works, The Silent Don and Virgin Soil Upturned, Sholokhov succeeds in bringing to life the Cossack world that he knew so well. Shrouded in legends, scorned for their barbarity, the Cossacks were little known to the Russians and totally unknown to Western readers. Sholokhov speaks in their dialect, clothes his characters in colorful Cossack traditions, and arms the soldiers with a spirit of courage and adventure. Part 1 of The Silent Don in particular and much of Virgin Soil Upturned shows them in their daily occupations, their celebrations and their interaction, much in their colorful and often crude language. Through his fictitious characters, all modeled on his own friends and acquaintances, the image of a people emerges.

Particularly in The Silent Don, Sholokhov skillfully combined Socialist Realism and art. Officially promulgated in 1934, Socialist Realism required that literature served the ideals of the Communist Party and portrayed a positive Soviet citizen. Early Soviet critics—with the exception of Aleksandr Serafimovich and Maxim Gorky—could not understand that The Silent Don, with its vacillating hero and its objective portrayal of both Reds and Whites, was a true proletarian novel, and they tried desperately to block its publication. Eventually, however, the critics accepted it because it showed the triumph of the Revolution through suffering and violence on both sides. Yet it was the artistic qualities of the novel, already evident in Sholokhov’s early short stories, and to be continued in Virgin Soil Upturned, that won millions of readers in the Soviet Union and abroad. The humanness of suffering, the tenderness of love, and the uncertainty of truth touched them.

It was not without difficulty that Sholokhov acquired this reputation. Particularly in The Silent Don, the censors mercilessly changed and deleted some of his most brilliant passages. Joseph Stalin asked that the hero of The Silent Don, Grigorii Melekhov, accept Communism, but Sholokhov refused, saying that this was against the artistic conception of the work. Although Virgin Soil Upturned received less criticism, the death of Davydov was a concession to Stalin’s wishes, since Sholokhov had planned a suicide. Yet the changes imposed on Sholokhov or accepted by him did not dim the original ideas that he had researched and reflected on painstakingly from...