Welcome to our Book Club!
Book Club discussions are held via Zoom on the last Thursday evening of odd-numbered months (with the exception of November, when we meet the Thursday prior to Thanksgiving)—7:00 p.m. start, Portland time. Our reading selections for 2023 were masterpieces from the Golden Age of Russian Literature (19th century), followed in 2024 by masterpieces from the Soviet era—the last of which is our current selection, Mikhail Sholokhov’s The Don Flows Home to the Sea (a sequel to And Quiet Flows the Don, discussed in November). See below for information about the author and novel, along with links to discussion questions and to our Zoom discussion meeting on The Don Flows Home to the Sea on Thursday, Jan. 30th, 2025.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov (Михаил Александрович Шолохов) was born in 1905, a rebellion-filled year that was prelude to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Raised in a Cossack village along the Don River in southern Russia, he utilized his firsthand experience with Cossack culture, the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War (serving in the Red Army at age 15) in the writing of And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea (published in 1928 and 1939, respectively). The 1300-page epic catapulted him to literary prominence within the Soviet Union, and then internationally as winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Sholokhov is considered one of the most enigmatic of Soviet writers, boldly protesting the persecution of the Don Cossacks during Stalin’s “Great Terror” purges of the 1930s while simultaneously basking in Stalin’s praise as a paragon of Socialist Realism, winning him the Stalin Prize for Literature in 1941. Bizarre as well were allegations by fellow writers (most notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn) that Sholokhov plagiarized content for Quiet Don and its sequel from a 1920s manuscript by Don River writer Fyodor Kruychov (a controversy to this day). Nonetheless, Sholokhov’s popularity with the public and his elite standing in the Communist Party never waned. He co-chaired the Soviet Writers Union from the 1930s until his death in 1984 and had the honor of traveling to the U.S. with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 as a member of the Central Committee. A devoted husband and father, Sholokhov’s marriage to Rostov sweetheart Maria Gromoslavskaya lasted for 60 years and resulted in four children.
ABOUT THE NOVEL
Like Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Sholokhov’s epic deals with universal themes—love vs. lust, fidelity vs. infidelity, kindness vs. cruelty, truth vs. illusion. One big difference, however, is that Sholokhov’s main protagonists are not urban aristocrats, but agrarian peasants adhering to a centuries-old macho, militaristic, patriarchal creed. To Sholokhov’s credit, he neither sugarcoats Cossack culture nor idealizes Marxism/Leninism in telling the story of a proud, independent people whose freedom is irreparably undermined by war, revolution, and civil strife.
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