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«With Kind Regards. L.Brezhnev”

The Museum collection holds thousands of letters, postcards and telegrams to Sholokhov from people of different generations, nationalities, professions. The most part of them are congratulations on awarding the writer the Nobel Prize in 1965, with a greeting address of the head of the State among them.

The congratulatory address of General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee L.I.Brezhnev, which joined the documentary collection of the Museum is an interesting document. Earlier, the congratulation of Brezhnev was kept in the archives of the writer’s personal secretary A.A.Zimovnov, later, in March of 2009, it was donated to the Museum-Reserve of M.A.Sholokhov by a historian and Maecenas, P.S.Kosov.

The greeting text is given below in full:

“Dear Mikhail Alexandrovich!

I heartily congratulate you on awarding the Nobel Prize, another sign of the international recognition of your powerful talent.

We all love you dearly as a prominent Soviet writer and man, whose life and work are imbued with a great sense of the truth of life, generous love for people and the native country.

I wish you many more years of creative youthfulness, new vitality and a great success for the glory of the Soviet literature.

With kind regards. L.Brezhnev.”

The text of congratulation is published for the first time.

Calls and telegrams from different parts of our country and abroad began to come to Sholokhov’s house already on October, 15, 1965, immediately after the official announcement by the Swedish Royal Academy about awarding the writer the Nobel Prize. During the day there were more than a hundred telegrams and by October, 17, their number had exceeded a few hundreds; letters began to come, newspapers broke the news. The relatives, friends, social institutions, workers, peasants, foreign writers, many prominent people, official figures and thousands of admirers of Sholokhov’s talent sent their warm words.

Nadezhda Sidorova