I read Sholokhov's 'And Quiet Flows the Don', Pasternak's 'Doctor Zhivago', Tolstoi's 'War and Peace', and Solzhenitsyn's 'First Circle' in the early 1970s.

The others were indeed memorable, but 'the Don' is burned into my mind's eye.

It paints a searing portrait of a vast, unforgiving steppe--then tears across it on horseback, leaving great waves of ethnic, political and personal upheaval in its wake.

I still smell the wheatfields in the wind and taste the black dust on my lips from the opening chapter.

I see villagers storm the home of one of their own and destroy his outlander wife for her foreignness.

I see an unhorsed cavalryman struggling to remove his bright blue Cossack breeches before capture in one of the Great War's opening battles with Austria, only to be plucked from danger at the last moment by the young Cossack who had stolen his wife before the war.

I hear the stolen woman, now become a fiery mistress, sobbing her heart out when the man whose child she bore leaves her at last for his own wife.

And after the firing squad's last volley in the closing chapter, I see a proud, condemned Cossack biting fiercely into his own shoulder, to make no sound as his blood pours out and stains the black steppe red.

In a quarter of a century, I still have not read a more powerful novel.

Mikhail Sholokov richly deserved his Nobel prize for literature. His literary work in "Quiet Flows the Don" is without doubt one of Russia's masterpieces. His ability to weave a complex and wonderfully graphic tapestry of cossack life before, during, and after Russia's October Revolution is remarkable. His descriptions of the land and the individual lives of the people inhabiting this area of Russia is visually stunning as I read the story images of the characters sprang to mind without effort. The reader will embark on a wonderful journey through a remarkable country at a critical time in human history. Sholokov style and prose is guaranteed to hold the reader captive. He truly is a worthy successor to Lev Tolstoy

Hailed as the best war novel to emerge from the Soviet, Sholokhov's epic has indeed solidified its position in world literature as a must read for those interested in the art of war. Yet, far more than a mere war novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, just as War and Peace had done, masterfully combines the men's martial vigor with the delicate sentimentalities that question war. The blend of peace fades into this gnawing passion in soldiers' bones as they march off to fight under some cause, a cause that has only become too hazy for name. Dedicated to the Cossacks who have resided by the Don for ages, Sholokhov follows a young Cossack's journey into the unknown terror of war. And Gregor Melekov's personal tragedy, blends w/ an array of Cossack characters: swindlers in love, Red Guards with a faith...the plot may appear too scattered at times, yet following Tolstoy's grand tradition to capture a supreme idea through the chasms of minute details, Sholokhov depicts the anguish of a people too wrapped up in honor, unable to cope with the nascent order of New Russia, regretful about allegiance to the Czar who ensured tensile peace, and ultimately lost to themselves as to "mistake each other for the enemies". We are taught that war does such to people, is peace to heal the wound then? I have yet to conclude this epic w/ The Don Flows Home to the Sea, but the glimpse of peace and yearning for tranquility have long glittered in the eyes of Gregor and his brothers/comrades, exhausted by struggles. A wonderful folk style book that brings one closer to the true picture of Cossack life--acquaint one w/ their lust, their yearning, their cowardice, and their courage.

This is the sequel to "And Quiet Flows the Don", and carries the story of the group of Don Cossacks into the period of Civil War in Russia which followed the Bolshevik Revolution.

If you're into war novels, you should enjoy this book. Basically, it's a long tale of the depravities of war, treachery infidelity, misfortune and atrocity. There is no way that the reader can retain a romanticised image of war after slogging through this. The horrors of war are made that bit more tragic by the fact that this was a civil war - towns, villages and even families were divided. Loyalties to the White Russians and to the Red Army were themselves ambiguous and mutable.

Sholokhov interrupts his narrative frequently with descriptions of the flora and fauna, and the seasonal changes in the Don area, as if to say that whatever humans get up to, Mother Nature just continues her work. I got the message Sholokhov was trying to impart about the insignificance of human obsessions quite early on, and found that the repeated descriptions of nature in the novel became more contrived and lost their effect as a result.

I think that the problem I had with the novel was its very bleakness. I have no problem with depicting war as it is rather than dressing it up in romantic verbiage, but as this story slogged its way on from one battle description and tale of inhumanity to the next, I struggled to keep going. There's no redeeming character in the whole novel - you feel that as unfortunate as all the characters were, their faults made you unsympathetic with their fates (the only possible exception is Gregor's wife, Natalia Melekhova, and as a whole the men are depicted far less sympathetically than the women - women's place in society made them greater victims).

I found myself torn between being depressed at Sholokhov's pessimistic vision of humanity, and thinking that in a civil war situation, such a conclusion would be almost inevitable. In all, the novel hardly an uplifting read: perhaps, with present world events, I was in need of something more optimistic.

This was the novel that first introduced me to Russian fiction. I first borrowed and read it from friends of my family in the late 1950s. The author later won the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature for this novel and the first part of it, "And Quiet Flows the Don". It is a very involved story of a Cossack family in the Don river area of Russia, prior to the 1917 revolution. Members of the family are involoved not only in WWI, but the sons are on different sides after the revolution (Red Army vs. White Army). I found myself getting very involved with the different family members. All of them with strong/weak points. The novel gives the reader a very good insight into the Cossack culture of the early 20th Century.

This book is probably the best work to make it out of Russia this century. This is a truly captivating tale of adventure, love, and war. The story twists and turns as the front lines move over the countryside. The author gives an unbiased portrait of the revolution, and all of it's bloody consequences. Definately a must read.

Awful commie propaganda. Slanderous portraits of Liberals and of the Whites in the civil war. Wafer-thin characters all around, from decadent blood-sucking nobles to gooey warm camaraderie amongst their "class enemies." Read Tolstoy instead. Life is too short.

Certainly a masterpiece, spellbinding for 1300 pp., I happened on this amazing book as a remainder at The Strand in New York. Difficulty keeping the generals apart and whose side they were on, but a captivating story that has led me to learn to read and write Russian with hopes of living there/studying there. I had been a fan of Russian poetry for a while, esp Ahkmatova, but this is really simply an unbelievable story. Would be interested in reading more about World War I and this part of the world. Read The Guns of August and now need to read the equivalent for this area. Your suggestions are encouraged.

This is the second time I've read this thousand over page tome and it's truly magnificent. The greatest Russian/Soviet novel this century. Sholokhov is in the ranks of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. An intensely beautiful, powerful and action filled tale of heroes in a land changed forever by war and revolution.

The Communist official Siemion Davidov arrives in the Don community of Gremyachy Log in order to start a collective farm. The community divides between those for the collective farm, and those (mainly the better-off farmers or "kulaks") fiercely opposed to it.

The subject of collectivisation in the rural Soviet Union will no doubt be as dry as old bones to many readers - that was my reaction too as I started the book. However, the Sholokhov explores many complicated issues:

* the view that all property is theft versus the inviolability of private property rights;

* do oppressive landowners deserve any loyalty from their workers?

* the conflict of essentially modernising forces (personified by Davidov, whose background is industrial-urban) with backward "traditional" rural Russia (personified by the locals); and even

* the catastrophic effects of contradictory dictats issued from the centre.

Sholokhov's position (I thought) was esssentialy pro-collectivisation, although he does not spare the reader the real problems associated with it. What does let the book down somewhat is that it's very uneven - there are long passages in which the characters tell anecdotes from their past, some meant to be humerous, others poignant. I thought most of these did not work well and were a distraction. Of course, it's fundamentally a bleak novel - the subject matter makes this almost inevitable. Luckily enough, I seemed to be in the mood!

I found this account of life on a collective farm totally boring. The only reason I can see for reading it is to experience a good example of what socialist realism can do to writing. The story and characters did not engage my interest. After reading this novel, I felt as bleak as the life it describes.

This novel is the sequel to "Virgin Soil Upturned", extending the story of collectivisation in the Don community of Gremyachy Log. As in "Virgin Soil Upturned", the chairman of the collective farm, Siemion Davidov, struggles to keep collectivisation on course in the face of the diffident attitudes of many of the workers and outright opposition of counter-revolutionaries.

Sholokhov continues many of the themes he explored in "Virgin Soil Upturned", and the characters are mainly the same. However, I found "Harvest of the Don" a less satisfying read. It's difficult to say why, because all the elements which made "Virgin Soil Upturned" interesting are there in this novel. The main problem, I thought, was that Sholokhov got the mixture of themes wrong, falling into the trap of recounting rural anecdotes and other humerous stories at considerable length. The result is that my attention was diverted from what should have been the main themes of the novel, and I found that the pace of the narrative was very uneven.

I thought that at the end, Sholokhov in part recognised this "fault" by attempting to quicken the pace of the novel and provide a dramatic end. It did not make up for the rest of the writing though. This is a pity - while not actually disliking this novel, I was disappointed.

This is a sequel of another epic novel, Virgin Soil Upturned. The lowdown about this novel is that the author was the favorite of the Soviet Communist Party (pitted against the likes of other Nobel prize winners Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak) and the subject matter SOUNDS boring: the collectivization of farming among Don Cossacks during the early history of the Soviet era.

But like all other great minds, Sholokhov is an aberration: despite being a true blue card-carrying member of the Central Committee and despite the seemingly boring subject, he is genuinely a first-class talent that to me is truly superior to Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, and approaches the likes of Turgenev and Gogol.

The pacing and humour of his narrative is similar to Dostoevsky -- fast and interesting, unlike Tolstoy who can be boring and didactic. Characterization and local color however is Tolstoyan: you can really recognize even the individual horses and the dogs, and the description of the peasantry and the countryside reminds one of the pastoral passages in Tolstoy.

The gritty and unflinching realism is very honest and peculiarly modern, but always in the best tradition of grand Russian novels: sweeping, panoramic, and places the reader right in the center of the whirlwind of events and emotions.