Museum Collection
An Autograph of Oles Gonchar
In our Museum there is a letter of Oles Gonchar, which was sent to Sholokhov from New-York in 1973.
“Dear Mikhail Aleksandrovich!
I am writing to you from afar, from over the ocean, where I, as “a diplomat for three months” (at the UNO session) have to while my days away among the gloomy canyons of skyscrapers.
I’d like to send you my congratulations for the jubilee of your creative work. I want to say how much the author of the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don” means for me in my life. I remember our talk in the hotel “Rossiya”, I remember the light of friendship and faith in the bright steppe Sholokhov’s eyes… Thank you for Thank you for it.
With all my heart I wish you good health. Let this autumn bring you warmth and company, let the eternal tulip steppe gladden you in many other springs.
Be aware that love of one more man is with you these days. Faithfully and forever yours. Oles Gonchar. 12.X.73. New-York.
P.S. If you wished to give a word in answer, you could write (the address is on the envelope, - O.G.)”.
Oles Gonchar wrote several publicistic articles about Sholokhov: “Flag-Officer of Soviet Literature”, “A Singer of People’s Life”, “Our Sholokhov”.
In one of them he writes: “Each of us discovered Sholokhov for himself in his own way. However, there was no man who was not shaken to the bottom of his heart by the emotional tension of Sholokhov’s works, their humanity, their grandeur.
The artistic word of Sholokhov for our literature made a standard of beauty and exigency, for many years it has been an antidote against literary primitivism, banality, dullness”.
“His books are like great discoveries. In them one can clearly hear a living gurgling sea of human passions, a powerful breathing of our great time. The passions, courageous and strong with their veracity, warmed up by the filial love for the Motherland, they penetrate into the very heart, enrich the inner world of man arming him for the struggle for reconstruction of the life, for building a new, communist society.
… For all our men of letters Sholokhov can serve a model for proximity to life, for strong connection with people, whom from he draws both his fine fascinating language and images of enormous poetic power”.
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