31 Facts About Mikhail Sholokhov

Mikhail Sholokhov is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the period of collectivization, primarily in his most famous novel, And Quiet Flows the Don.

Mikhail Sholokhov's father, a Russian, Aleksander Mikhailovich Sholokhov, was a member of the lower middle class, at various times a farmer, a cattle trader, and a miller.

Mikhail Sholokhov did not become literate until a time in her life when she wanted to correspond with her son.

Mikhail Sholokhov's family were not Don Cossacks, but inogorodnye, the rather disparaging term used by the Don Cossacks for outsiders who settled in their territory by the banks of the Don.

Mikhail Sholokhov attended schools in Karginskaya, Moscow, Boguchar, and Veshenskaya until 1918, when he joined the Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War at the age of 13.

Mikhail Sholokhov completed his first literary work, the short story "The Birthmark", at 19.

In 1922 Mikhail Sholokhov moved to Moscow to become a journalist, but had to support himself through manual labour.

Mikhail Sholokhov was a stevedore, a stonemason, and an accountant from 1922 to 1924, but he intermittently participated in writers' "seminars".

Mikhail Sholokhov's first published work was a satirical article, The Test.

In 1924 Mikhail Sholokhov returned to Veshenskaya and devoted himself entirely to writing.

Mikhail Sholokhov covered the devastation caused by Wehrmacht troops along the Don.

Mikhail Sholokhov's mother was killed when Veshenskaya was bombed in 1942.

Mikhail Sholokhov's collected works were published in eight volumes between 1956 and 1960, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965.

Mikhail Sholokhov asked the Pravda newspaper to prove his authorship, submitting his manuscripts of the first three volumes of And Quiet Flows the Don and the plan of the fourth one.

The allegations resurfaced in the 1960s with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a notable proponent, possibly in retaliation for Mikhail Sholokhov's scathing opinion of Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

In 1984 Norwegian Slavicist and mathematician Geir Kjetsaa, in a monograph written with three other colleagues, provided statistical analyses of sentence lengths showing that Mikhail Sholokhov was likely the true author of And Quiet Flows the Don.

The debate focused on the published book, because Mikhail Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid during the Second World War and no manuscript material or drafts were known.

Mikhail Sholokhov had had his friend Vassily Kudashov look after it, and after he was killed at war his widow took possession of the manuscript, but she never disclosed it.

Mikhail Sholokhov met Joseph Stalin in 1930, and subsequently was one of very few people who dared to give the dictator a truthful account of what was happening in the country and nonetheless was not punished.

Mikhail Sholokhov joined the CPSU in 1932, and in 1937 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.

Stalin sent another official, Vladimir Stavsky, to investigate, and invited Mikhail Sholokhov to visit him in the Kremlin.

On 23 October 1938, Mikhail Sholokhov met Stalin in the Kremlin to complain that he had been put under surveillance in Veshenskaya, but when Yezhov was summoned to explain, he claimed not to know why.

Mikhail Sholokhov said his orders had come from Moscow, but Yezhov again denied giving the order.

Mikhail Sholokhov claimed that he completed the fourth and last volume of And Quiet Flows the Don and its sequel on 21 December 1939, the day when the USSR was celebrating what was supposedly Stalin's 60th birthday, and celebrated by opening a bottle of wine that Stalin had given him.

Mikhail Sholokhov then wrote to Stalin to say how he had marked the special day.

Mikhail Sholokhov became a member of the CPSU Central Committee in 1961, Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939, and was a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet.

Mikhail Sholokhov was twice awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, and later became vice president of the Union of Soviet Writers.

Mikhail Sholokhov almost stopped writing after 1969 and spent the late years at the Vyoshenskaya stanitsa.

Mikhail Sholokhov used his Order of Lenin money to build a local school and his Nobel Prize to take the family on a road trip over Europe and Japan.

Mikhail Sholokhov died on 21 February 1984, from laryngeal cancer.

Mikhail Sholokhov was buried in the grounds of his house at the Vyoshenskaya stanitsa along with his wife Maria Petrovna Sholokhova.