Customer Reviews

Quiet Flows the Don

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Sholokhov's mighty work came out in English in the early 1950s if I recall; it may have been late 1940s. The translation was incomplete and the title was "And Quiet Flows the Don". A sequel came out under the title, "The Don flows Home to the Sea", both published by Wishart and Lawrence, a UK publisher with the courage to sponsor such works. Neither volume I now learn reflected accurately what Sholokhov wrote.
When the 1996 translation appeared, brilliantly executed and edited, I snapped it up immediately and also sent a copy to a former spouse in Europe. I read Sholokhov's first work as a teenager and still recall the inability to put the book down as well as being emotionally shocked at several sections of the narrative.
I came across this page in seeking any book by Professor Murphy since he has written extensively on the Cossacks and Sholokhov; re-reading the book raises my curiosity to learn more about that region of the former USSR and its inhabitants. I take the opportunity to recommend a rattling good read that provides an inside view of life in the pre-revolutionary Don basin and a rather well balanced view of the revolution and the civil war. Yes, yes, the hero Stokman is a little too upright and heroic as a communist and yes, the kulak/capitalist Molkhov a little too villainous... but these were small pecadillos when the book was written. If the model of Stokman was intended to inspire readers, they could have had far worse models!
The work did not earn the author the Nobel literature prize for nothing!

With this book Sholokov has created an absolute masterpiece that not only vividly recreates the world of the Don Cossacks, but slowly, agonizingly, shows how the Great War and the subsequent Civil Wars savaged that world, leaving nothing untouched. Amazingly for a book written during Soviet times, it slips the stink of propoganda: the Cossacks, sometimes choosing sides arbitrarily, massacres each other with numbing disregard for ideology. Sholokov couples the tragic sweep of events with a artist's eye for detail, loving recreating the pastoral pre-War Eden, and soberly describing the smoking ruins that envelope it. Perhaps the book becomes slightly overlong in the second volume, but that is a small price to pay for something so splendid.

This is the second time I've read this thousand over page tome and it's truly magnificent. The greatest Russian/Soviet novel this century. Sholokhov is in the ranks of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. An intensely beautiful, powerful and action filled tale of heroes in a land changed forever by war and revolution.

Certainly a masterpiece, spellbinding for 1300 pp., I happened on this amazing book as a remainder at The Strand in New York. Difficulty keeping the generals apart and whose side they were on, but a captivating story that has led me to learn to read and write Russian with hopes of living there/studying there. I had been a fan of Russian poetry for a while, esp Ahkmatova, but this is really simply an unbelievable story. Would be interested in reading more about World War I and this part of the world. Read The Guns of August and now need to read the equivalent for this area. Your suggestions are encouraged.

This book has always been compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace and as a reader who has read both many times, I personally believe that Quiet Flows the Don supercedes W&P in all aspects. What a novel! The violence is hard to take at first (and it is violent; Russia during this time was not a safe place to be), but keep at it and you'll be glad you did. What a beautiful work! Sholokhov doesn't sugarcoat the Whites and he certainly doesn't sugarcoat the Reds. This is one of two or three novels where I've actually cried and I'm not a person who usually does so. When the main character's beloved horse is killed out from under, I don't know many people who wouldn't have cried. Just incredibly beautiful writing! Sholokhov may have never wrote anything else to equal it but one novel like this is a blessing from the Gods. His reputation suffered later with some pretty cowardly actions which I won't try to (or want to) defend but the only complaint I have with this volume is the British idioms used in some places, which can be quite awkward (think of all those Chekhov translations with sentences starting with: "I say..."). Other than that, this is a nice edition with maps and all.

In the same league as "A tale of two cities". A great story set in the backdrop of the Cossack life during the most turbulent times in Russia. In four volumes, this great romantic work will keep you absorbed till the very end...

Queit Flows the Don

Awful commie propaganda. Slanderous portraits of Liberals and of the Whites in the civil war. Wafer-thin characters all around, from decadent blood-sucking nobles to gooey warm camaraderie amongst their "class enemies." Read Tolstoy instead. Life is too short.