Mikhail Sholokhov

Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov, the son of a farming family, was born in 1905 in the small village of Kruzhilin, near the Don River, to a Cossack mother and a Russian father. In 1917, with the outbreak of the October Revolution, he left school and joined the Red Army. In 1922, he moved to Moscow, where he took on various manual jobs. At the same time, he wrote short stories that began to be published in newspapers and magazines. In 1926, after returning to his village, his first collection of short stories, "Tales from the Don," was published. A year earlier, in 1925, he had started writing his most epic and well-known novel, "And Quiet Flows the Don," a project that occupied him for 15 years. In 1932, he became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), in 1958 a member of the Supreme Soviet, and in 1961 a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. From 1939, he served as a member of the Board of the Union of Soviet Writers and as a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1941, he was awarded the Stalin Prize. In 1955, he accompanied Khrushchev to the United States. In 1965, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He passed away in 1984. His most significant works include "And Quiet Flows the Don," "Virgin Soil Upturned," and "The Fate of a Man."