News

News

Remembering the Great Writer

February 21, is the Memory Day of M.A.Sholokhov, the great Russian writer, the Nobel Prize winner in literature. He passed away on a cold February night of 1984, but his books, which entered the treasury of the world literature, go on living.

The attractive force of Sholokhov’s work is enormous, his books are off the beaten track, timeless and impressive for the reader. If you open the book and read the first phrase, you are unable to tear yourself away from it. You enter the world unknown to you before, get to know quite a new life and meet with the people interesting for you, whose lives become dear to you.

Sholokhov’s works are known and loved not only in Russia, but also far abroad. Both the Russian and foreign contemporary writers highly appreciated the great master of word and warmly remembered the meetings with him. There are some fragments of the letters:

M.A.Andriasov: “Mikhail Alexandrovich is an unusually interesting and lively interlocutor.  Every meeting with him enriches and gives something new what you didn’t know before. In his life he meets lots of people. He has a magnificent memory. He is a wonderful storyteller. When remembering the events of thirty years ago he brings back every detail, and the time disappears and you see a clear, convincing and lively picture, as if everything he is speaking about took place only yesterday or some days ago.”

E.N.Permitin: “I do not just admire the work of Mikhail Sholokhov, I live by him. When reading Sholokhov’s books I did not see pages, separate lines and words, they disappeared completely. I saw living people with their great and bright love and intense hatred, with their suffering and joy.”

AS.Serafimovich: “The works of Sholokhov with their truthfulness, sincerity, with their inner beauty and artistic cogency, with their colourfulness and psychological analysis found a wide access into the hearts of foreign readers.”

S.P.Babayevsky: “Everything what he (M.A.Sholokhov) was to know as a literary man, he has got it already inside him, it was given to him as a gift of nature, and that is why the great talent grew up and got to his feet unusually early…  Whichever page you may begin reading, everywhere you will see talent. Reading the novel you see before your eyes the life rising exactly as it really is.”

P.U.Brovka: “I read the works by great artists several times. I turned back to Sholokhov many times, and each time I discovered something new, that I didn’t know before. What an inexhaustible depth of his books, indeed! I thank him a lot for all the good, for all he created himself and for his numerous disciples following their teacher.”

E.Hemingway: “Among the modern writers I like Sholokhov.”

J.Lindsey: “The first writer, who had a strong influence on the cultural life of England, was Sholokhov, whose novels have admittedly such a breadth and such wealth of colours and images that we can speak about the proximity of his novels to classical works of the XIX century.”

…On the Memory Day of Sholokhov we remember about the high and the eternal. The years pass changing generations, but Sholokhov’s personages remain with us. And each time we feel how modern, how timely are the books by the great writer, and we know that they will live an infinitely long life.

Marina Debur