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The Story “The Way is the Path” is 95 Years

95 years ago, from April 25 to May 21, 1925, the story "The Way is the Path” by Mikhail Sholokhov was published in several issues of the newspaper “Molodoy Leninist”.

The story was based on real events that took place in stanitsa Karghinskaya in the autumn of 1918 (the first part of the story) and in September 1920 (the second part), of which the would-be writer was a witness and direct participant. Mikhail Sholokhov wrote in one of his autobiographies: “Since 1920, I served and hobbled over the Don land. For a long time I was a production worker. Chasing gangs that ruled the Don until 1922, and gangs chasing us. Everything went as it should. I had to be in different bindings. ” One of these "bindings" almost cost him his life. In the autumn of 1920, Mikhail Sholokhov was captured by Makhno and only by a lucky chance escaped death. A reflection of the dramatic events of those days is guessed in the story “The Way is the Path”, where its hero, Petka Kremnev, found himself in a situation experienced several years ago by the writer himself.

In the story, we meet people whom Mikhail Sholokhov personally knew and who became the prototypes of the heroes. This is a family of postovals (postovat was a producer of felt and felt boots, a wool felter), who actually lived in the stanitsa Karghinskaya. This is Alexander Pokusaev, the prototype of Petka Kremnev, the secretary of the unit of The Revolutionary Communist Youth League (Bolsheviks). Grigory Raskov, a member of the unit of the Komsomol bureau is in the story under his name. The described scenes of the entry of the Makhno gang in stanitsa Karghinskaya is also the personal impressions of the young writer: the Makhnovists were indeed in the stanitsa, having located their headquarters in the house of the priest Vissarion Evseev. This house has been preserved; now it is a village library.

In the story “The Way is the Path” Mikhail Sholokhov describes in detail the meeting in the steppe of Petka Kremnev with the Makhnovists: “Passing the melons, we climbed the hill. Petka dropped the cartridge pouch, turned to pick it up, and gasped: on that side of the section, horsemen descended in orderly columns. At the front, a black banner fluttered”.

All that Mikhail Sholokhov told us in his short story “The Way is the Path,” and in other early works, all this was experienced by him, suffered and endured in his heart, so some of the stories are autobiographical in nature.

All these are not fictitious stories, all this was, in fact, on the Don during the years of the Civil War, and therefore these stories are so striking in their merciless truthfulness.

Many years later, Mikhail Sholokhov told the famous literary critic Konstantin Priyma: “In the “Don Stories”, I tried to write the truth of life, to write about what worried me the most…” 

Natalya Kirsanova