The Quiet Don (set in 2 volumes)

The prototype of one of the characters in "The Quiet Don" — the leader of the uprising described in the novel — recalled how the Cossacks, after reading the book, asked: "Who did that Sholokhov serve in the staff, that he transcended and depicted everything so thoroughly?" Even the participants in those events didn't guess: the author of the "Cossack 'War and Peace'" was still a teenager during World War I and the Civil War. The young writer, who had finished only four grades of gymnasium (yet engaged in self-education), began working on "The Quiet Don" at the age of twenty-three. He completed this work two decades later — as a famous public figure and laureate of many awards, to which the Nobel Prize was added in 1965. Receiving the highest literary award, Sholokhov said: "The novel... most predisposes to a deep understanding of the vast life around us, rather than to attempts to present one’s small ‘I’ as the center of the universe." The research of this "vast life," in which historical events are inseparable from the fates of ordinary people, is what "The Quiet Don" embodies.