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News

Expedition to Kazakhstan

The State M.A.Sholokhov Museum-Reserve set out an expedition about Sholokhov’s places of the Urals devoted to the 70^th anniversary of the first trip of M.A.Sholokhov to Kazakhstan. The Museum expedition was joined by the members of the Children and Youth Ecological Movement “Sholokhov Source”.

In Uralsk, the West-Kazakhstan Region, we visited the local area museum “Old Uralsk” which expositions tell about the life of the Yaik Cossacks, met with a friend of M.A.Sholokhov, Bisen Zhumgaliyev, an honorary freeman of Uralsk.

In the village of Daryinskoye, thirty kms from Uralsk, where the Sholokhovs family lived in evacuation in 1942-1943, there is the world’s first memorial museum of M.A.Sholokhov, which began its work at the writer’s lifetime. The director of the museum, Olga Andreyevna Chekanova, welcomed us and held an excursion about the memorial house and the museum site, told about Sholokhov’s stay in the Urals.

The Museum delegation met with the teachers and students of Daryinskaya school, where the daughter of M.A. Sholokhov, Svetlana, studied in the time of the evacuation. The schoolchildren told about their club of “Sholokhov Studies”, where they investigate the life and work of the writer, the culture and nature of their home country.

We also visited one of the favourite resting places of  M.A.Sholokhov a tract of Bratanovsky Yar.

The Museum of Sholokhov has a good tradition to plant in different parts of the country the trees and bushes brought from Sholokhov land. In different years, in Kazakhstan, there were planted chestnuts grown in the estate of Mikhail Alexandrovich, lilac bushes of “Mikhail Sholokhov” sort and Crimean pine seedlings, which have got accustomed well on the Kazakhstan land to delight the locals and visitors.

During the expedition we got acquainted with the materials about the stay of the writer in the postwar time in Kazakhstan, exchanged our experience with the experts of environmental education of the younger generation.

Marina Sychova