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“I Remember My First Meeting with the Writer Forever…”

90 years ago, in the summer of 1930, there took place the first meeting of Mikhail Sholokhov and Andrei Plotkin, who became one of the prototypes of Semyon Davydov in the novel "Virgin Soil Upturned". A twenty-four-year-old Kiev worker, in the recent past, a ship's mechanic Andrei (Abo) Plotkin, had been sent to build a new farm. He took part in the creation of the collective farm named after Semyon Budyonny in the stanitsa Vyoshenskaya and became the chairman of this collective farm. The board of the collective farm was located next street to the house of Mikhail Sholokhov. So, Plotkin and Sholokhov met. Soon, the collective farm board was transferred to the Lebyazhy farm, twenty kilometers from Vyoshenskaya.

The first acquaintance grew into a long-standing friendship.

For excesses in his activities in 1933, Plotkin received a strict party penalty and a ban on working with the collective farm masses. In a letter to Joseph Stalin Mikhail Sholokhov describes the anti-human methods that Andrei Plotkin used to fulfill the plan for grain procurement. At the same time, the writer retained a warm attitude towards Plotkin, congratulated him on his sixtieth birthday, and in the post-war era, when there was an acute shortage of leading cadres in the village, he called him to Don, specially seeking permission in high spheres so that he could come. However, Andrei Plotkin refused to return to rural life.

Working on the novel "Virgin Soil Upturned", the writer took the characters from life. Sholokhov wrote to Plotkin about his role in the novel in December 1965: "... You have a particle of my Davydov!"

In 1933, Mikhail Sholokhov presented Andrei Plotkin “Virgin Soil Upturned” with the inscription: “To dear Andrei Plotkin, one of the many twenty-five thousand workers making the collective farm revolution in the Vyoshensky district, for friendship. M. Sholokhov. March 20, 1933." Plotkin continued to be a close friend of Sholokhov ever.

Marina Debur