The Modern Novel

Biography

Mikhail Sholokhov was born Mikhail Stefanovich Kuznetsov in 1905 in Kruzhilin, a small town in the Don region. His mother was married to Stefan Kuznetsov at the time so that, though Aleksandr Sholokhov was the biological father, young Mikhail took the name of Kuznetsov. This enabled him to be registered as a Cossack (which his biological father was not) with the associated privileges, including land ownership. The couple legally married eight years after young Sholokhov’s birth, after Kuznetsov had died, and Aleksandr Sholokhov adopted his son who then took his biological father’s name. Aleksandr Sholokhov was a tradesman and frequently moved but eventually settled in Kargin. Mikhail received some education but, when he was fourteen, the civil war spread to his region and, after witnessing brutalities by both sides, he joined the Red Army. As he said in his autobiography, his group chased and was chased by White partisans. He was captured by Nestor Makhno but released.

He started writing at the age of seventeen and moved to Moscow to work as a journalist, though he had to support himself with a variety of jobs. He wrote numerous stories, some of which were published in a collection in 1926, when he also started writing Тихий Дон (Part 1: And Quiet Flows the Don; Part 2: The Don Flows Home to the Sea) which was first published in magazine form and which he worked on for the next fourteen years. The book was hugely successful but he never published anything else of comparable quality. He won the Nobel Prize in 1965. He died in 1984.

Other links

Michail Sholokhov
Michail Sholokhov
Michail Sholokhov
Шолохов, Михаил (in Russian)