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A Memorial Plaque in Honour of the Author of “And Quiet Flows the Don” is Opened in Moscow

A memorial plaque in honour of M.A.Sholokhov is opened in the Klyazma Microdistrict of Moscow. Here, in house 15, in Lermontovskaya, in 1927–1928, Mikhail Sholokhov, a future Nobel Prize winner, lived and worked over the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”.

At the ceremony of opening the memorial plaque, ethnographer A.F.Malyavko told about the history of that symbolic place and little known episodes of Sholokhov’s stay in the village. The representatives of Pushkino Administration, the Museum professionals, old residents, teachers, librarians and students also spoke at the ceremony.

Vladimir Andrushkevich, Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation, a resident of Pushkino, made a great work in the 1960-s to identify the address of Sholokhov in Klyazma.

In June of 1927, M.A.Sholokhov came to Moscow and gave his manuscript of the first volume of the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don” to the publisher “Moskovsky Rabochy” (Moscow Worker). The manuscript being under consideration, he got a job as head of the literary department of the “Zhurnal Krestiyanskoy Molodyozhi” (The journal of Peasant Youth) and settled with his family in a summer colony of Klyazma. Here, in the house of cabinetmaker D.A. Kapkov, the writer rented two rooms with a private entrance: a lower room with a terrace and a small upper room – a mezzanine with a balcony facing east.

D.A.Kapkov recalled, that “young and active Mikhail Alexandrovich would suddenly come out into the yard and begin romping on the snow with his family. In summer he liked going for walks with his family in the forest, which at that time spread all over the place of the present Klyazma. He would sit down at the writing table usually in the evening, when his restless daughter Svetlana got asleep and the whole house died down, and would work until deep into the night.”

In the book “Klyazma. In Times and Persons” by ethnographer A.F.Malyavko, there is a chapter “The Quiet Don” in Klyazma” devoted to the Klyazma period in the life of M.A.Sholokhov.

Tatiyana Nektova