News

News

“And Quiet Flows the Don”. 1926

In November 1926, M.A.Sholokhov began working over a rough autograph of the first part of “And Quiet Flows the Don”. The text of the third chapter of the novel was dated 6, 8, and 9 November (beginning with the words “Grigory came back from public merrymaking early in the morning”), which opened the novel at that time.

Some days later, the writer decided to change the beginning of the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”. During the 15 and 16 of November he wrote a fragment of the text which finally became the first and the second chapters of the work. Then, the novel opened with the well-known words: “The Melekhovs’ farmyard was at the outedge of the hamlet.”

There is preserved an autograph of a variant of the novel beginning dated autumn 1925, with a deleted title: “The Quiet Don //novel.//The first part”, which was made within the conception connected with the Cossack participation in the campaign of General Kornilov against Petrograd in August 1917. The autograph text was used by Sholokhov in creation of the 8th and the 15th chapters of the fourth part of the second book of the “And Quiet Flows the Don”.

The writer repeatedly confirmed that the work over the big novel started in autumn of 1925. But the final conception of the world-known novel was formed only in 1926.

Galina Vorontsova