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House with mezzanine

85 years ago, the Sholokhov family settled in a house with a mezzanine on the Sovetskaya street, 50. It was located on the territory of modern Estate of Mikhail Sholokhov.

It was the writer’s favorite house, which was built according to Mikhail Sholokhov’s own design for the first large fees for the “Don Stories” and the first books of the “And Quiet Flows the Don”. Here Mikhail Sholokhov completed the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”, worked over the 2nd book of “Virgin Soil Upturned”. Here, the Sholokhovs had two children: son Mikhail and daughter Maria.

From this house the writer traveled to Europe, helped in the improvement of the stanitsa Vyoshenskaya. This house was visited by writers, composers, filmmakers. Hundreds of people came here for help, there were numerous letters.

Speaking about the internal appearance of the house, the eldest daughter of the writer Svetlana Sholokhova said: “Father planned that house with Pyetr Gromoslavsky (father of Maria Sholokhova, father-in-law of the writer). <...> A veranda; Anastasia Danilovna's room; next to it there was a room, where Sasha and I lived; dad and mom's bedroom; a hall; a dining room; a kitchen. In the hall there was a staircase upstairs. There were 2 rooms on the mezzanine. <...> There was a library - along the perimeter - all the walls from the floor to the ceiling. In the study there was a desk, sofa and radio. It was cozy for him, a small room, isolated. The staircase was closed, like in a case. The noise didn’t reach him.”

The house and the wooden fence were painted blue. In the courtyard there was a kitchen with a Russian stove and a bathhouse, a garage, a cellar, a glacier, a stable, a dovecote. The farm consisted of cows, horses, pigs, chickens, dogs.

The Second World War began. By the summer of 1942 in stanitsa Vyoshenskaya there was the only surviving bridge across the Don, it was of strategic importance: it was built as a backup option in the event of the retreat of Soviet troops from Kharkov and Lugansk. When the Germans broke through the front and moved to Stalingrad and the Caucasus, a retreat began. Around the bridge there accumulated several thousand combat units. Throughout the night from July 7 to 8, troops and military equipment went over the bridge, and in the morning Vyoshenskaya was subjected to the first bombing, which also captured the writer’s house.

On this day, July 8, 1942, the mother of the writer Anastasia Danilovna died, being seriously wounded by a fragment of an exploding bomb. The Sholokhovs' family was evacuated beyond the Volga, in the Urals, and the writer having buried his mother returned to the front.

From July 1942 to February 1943, the writer’s house was used as an observation post for units of the Red Army, since it occupied a very convenient position and the entire right bank of the Don was clearly visible from it. As a result, it was repeatedly bombarded. In the courtyard of the Sholokhovs' house, all the outbuildings burned down. A bomb that got into the house damaged the poles on which the mezzanine was mounted. Furniture and other things disappeared from the house. The writer's archive and his richest library were lost.

Returning in 1944 to stanitsa Vyoshenskaya from the evacuation, the Sholokhovs spent summer in a house with a mezzanine, and in the autumn the writer moved his family to Moscow to the government-provided apartment in pereulok Starokonyushenny, 19, apt. 44. But all life and creative plans of Mikhail Sholokhov were associated with Veshenskaya.

In 1949, the Sholokhovs moved to a new house, built in return for a house with a mezzanine that could not to be restored, but the writer’s family, as well as those who managed to visit it, had the warmest memories.

Elena Popova