Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich [key], 1905–84, Russian novelist. Sholokhov won international fame for an epic novel of his native land, The Silent Don (4 vol., 1928–40; tr. in 2 vol., And Quiet Flows the Don, 1934, and The Don Flows Home to the Sea, 1941). The work, which won a Stalin Prize in 1941, describes the effect of World War I, the revolution, and the civil war on the lives of the Don Cossacks. A propagandistic novel, Virgin Soil Upturned, deals with the collectivization of agriculture; it won a Lenin Prize in 1960. Its first volume is Seeds of Tomorrow (1932–33, tr. 1959), and the second is Harvest on the Don (1960, tr. 1960). Sholokhov was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature, being the first officially sanctioned Soviet laureate.
See E. J. Simmons, Russian Fiction and Soviet Ideology; studies by D. H. Stewart (1967) and M. Klimenko (1972).
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