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“A Word of Yours is My Joy”

On February 20, on the eve of the Memory Day of M.A.Sholokhov, a memorial evening dedicated to the upcoming date was held in the Palace of Culture of Vyoshenskaya. The organizers of the event devoted their literary and documentary composition to the relations of the writer and Yevgeniya Grigoryevna Levitskaya, a worker of the publisher “Moskovsky Rabochiy”, who was the first to give “a green light” to the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”. The name of the composition is the line from the response letter of the aspiring novelist to the experienced publisher: “A word of yours is my joy”.

The composition (scripted by S.Gribanov, staged by T.Galitsyna) was based on the most characteristic passages from the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don” and on the fragments of the correspondence between M.A.Sholokhov and Y.G.Levitskaya. The meeting time of these most interesting people, an old Bolshevik woman and a future Nobel Prize winner, was difficult; those years coincided with the collectivization period with its excesses and repression. Seeing the iniquity Sholokhov experienced a great nervous tension, but he did not stay aside, he showed a strong character untypical for his age raising his voice in defence of the truth. Yevgeniya Grigoryevna supported him: under her promotion Sholokhov’s letters about criminal acts of some leaders of the Rostov and some northern regions got onto the desk of Stalin. And the situation, though partially, was amended.

In 1930, Levitskaya and her younger son Igor visited the Sholokhovs in Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya. Thereafter, their acquaintance grew into a real friendship of the two families. Communication in everyday life, literary talks caused so high mutual trust that later the writer called Yevgeniya Grigoryevna his “second mother”.

All those stressful events were with a high degree of confidence transferred to the stage surrounded with portraits of writers and his elder preceptress as if having an invisible conversation. The director of the performance actively used all the stage space, a crowd and a video originally selected. The dynamically changing scenes showing the life of the Levitskys and the Sholokhovs were performed by the Museum workers.

The audience, veterans and young people of Vyoshenskaya warmly received the successful performance enabling to touch once again the initial period of the writer’s creative biography.

The event was visited by the writer’s grandson A.M.Sholokhov, Deputy Chairman of the Committee for Culture of the RF State Duma.

Alexey Kochetov