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Schoolchildren Wrote to M.A.Sholokhov

Within the frames of a special course of “Sholokhov Studies” which has been a success at the State M.A.Sholokhov Museum-Reserve for many years the classes were given for the fifth-graders of the Sholokhov school and the secondary school of Stanitsa  Vyoshenskaya.

The course is aimed  at informing and attracting the children to study the art, life and social activity of  the great writer M.A. Sholokhov. The classes were based on the letters of schoolchildren to the writer from the documentary holding collection.

The letters came from many parts of  the  big country and from abroad. In many of them the art of the writer was highly appreciated. The children showed their interest in the prospective destinies of the personages from Sholokhov’s works. There were congratulations for the Nobel Prize awarding, for the jubilees of the   writer, there were requests to send books with his autograph for the school museums, invitations for visiting schools.

The learners got interested in the letters of their age mates. Some letters were written in verse.

The teachers and students of  the Zanadvorovskaya secondary school wrote in May 1965: ”We are sending you our congratulation and a parcel with our Primorskaya taiga gifts: Korean cedar cones, schizandra seeds (a valuable Tibetan medicine), ginseng root, Manchzhur  nuts, as well as an album , which pictures will show you the nature of the Primorsky region…”. The authors of the letter invited the writer to visit them.

The students of the fifth grade from Stanitsa Kirpilskaya wrote in December 1977 about their impressions of the short story “Nakhalyonok” (Bastard): “At one of our class hours we had a talk about our favourite literary personage. The children like many of the personages , but the most favourite is Mishka Korshunov from “Nakhalyonok”. What a fearless, kind and clear boy he is!!! Thank you, dear Mikhail Alexandrovich, for the pleasure of reading your story…”. In the same letter the children asked the writer to become their patron and help them to equip the study of the Russian Language and Literature.

The members of the museum classes especially enjoyed the letter from the sixth-grade students of Khorol, the Poltava Region, dated 1979. The children wrote: “…Recently at our Literature lesson we read your short story “Nakhalyonok”. Then we had a discussion on it. Our teacher suggested us to complete the story about the prospective life of Mishka. We imagined Mishka to be a pilot, a tank man and a vice-admiral, to be the Hero of the Soviet Union and the Hero of Socialist Labour, to raise virgin soils. Other students imagined him to be a writer, and all of us considered him to be a veteran of war and labour. They fancied, Mikhail Fomich, decorated with his battle and labour awards, came to schoolchildren and told them about his glorious past. Some students described him to have died a death of a hero.

In the friendly discussion about the prototype of Mishka we tried to guess if you had written about yourself. We counted how old you are, found out, that in your childhood and youth you had to fight against the kulaks.

Dear Mikhail Alexandrovich! Thank you for “Nakhalyonok”, we read it with great interest and excitement. We feel deeply sorry for Mishka’ father, but we are all sure, that Mishka made a great, real man…”.

Then the children of Vyoshenskaya, living in the XXI century, with great interest listened to the compositions written by the Ukrainian sixth-graders more than 30 years ago.

Many letters came to Sholokhov from foreign countries – Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, the USA and others. Thus, the students of the Hungarian town of Debretsen, having learned from newspapers about the coming visit of the writer to Hungary, in March 1964, invited him to their school. In April 1983, the children of the Bulgarian town of Vrats sent their compositions about the prospective life of Vanya Sokolov and asked the writer to estimate them.

The students learned a lot of interesting things at the lessons. The letters moved the young Sholokhov learners into the remote 50-80-s of the past century, enabled them to feel the air of the epoch and immerse into the atmosphere of those years.

The letters of schoolchildren to Sholokhov are only a small part of the enormous museum collection. However they show the attitude of the young people to the writer, they are a peculiar chronicle of that time, they enlarge and supplement the materials about the art and life of M.A. Sholokhov.

Lyudmila Afanasiyeva