Spoiler-free review

(Part of my plan to read lots of long Russian novels in 2023.)

This is a strange book to read. I'm not even sure I've read it all. The 'unabridged' audiobook stops about halfway through. I carried on with a print edition from 1970, only to learn that more chapters were unearthed in the 1990s.

Sholokhov's writing is astonishingly beautiful. The only other writer to capture landscape so evocatively is Tolstoy. The vivid imagery of the countryside also reminded me of Thomas Hardy's novels. The characters were also very striking and unforgettable. However, there is a lot of violence, endless war, and rape. I got the impression that the Cossacks were constantly engaging in incest and adultery, and the women were treated terribly. The characters were all deeply flawed.

Strange, wonderful, shocking, beautiful.

Greatest work of literature I have ever read.

A Russian epic of war, Cossack village life and the human element. Reasonably well written although it wanders often, skips about and can be tedious. The characters are remote and give the reader little reason to care much about them.

It was decent enough to read four hundred pages worth, so 2.5 stars

Russian

Whoa...I feel like I just gave birth to a baby. LOL And it wasn't an easy pregnancy, by all means. This book wasn't an easy read for several reasons. One of them was the language. I read it in Russian and even though I am fluent in it, I had to dig out my Russian dictionary. Sholokhov uses a lot of local dialect and for about first 150 or so pages I felt completely lost. Once I got used to his way of writing the going got a lot easier.
Another reason this book was a little difficult for me was the subject matter. Growing up in the Soviet Union I thought I had a pretty good idea of who the "good guys" were and who were the "bad guys". For as long as I can remember it was clear as night and day: Red Army is good, White Army is bad. Sholokhov kept playing with those beliefs: all of the sudden I saw that each side was both right and wrong (in their own ways). On one page I sympathized with Red Army and on the next page I was rooting for White Army and then back again and again and again. I don't even know how Sholokhov managed to get this book published in the first place considering when it was written.
Despite those difficulties, I am glad I finally read this book. Been a long time coming...

Reviewing a book written in the 1930’s and awarded a Pulitzer in the 1960’s is a bit silly. BUT….never let it be said I’m not silly in my review writing. I picked this book up in a used book sale for a charity in town. Confusion being my middle name, I was thinking of “Bridge on the Drina” by Ivo Andric when I bought it and whoops, this is now on my bookshelves. Time to clean the shelves out, so down comes the Quiet Don’s first half.

This is a nice complimentary layer on the history of Russia in the early part of the 20th century, either the Stalinized version or the Westernized version, your choice. (How much Stalin censored is a good position to think about from time to time). Focused on the Cossacks, the book is portioned into 4 parts: Peace, War (as in WWI), Revolution, and Civil War.

Peaceful Cossacks are not someone I want to hang with; if you’re thinking about reading this reflect on how graphic rape, gang-rape, more rape and utter disregard for women will affect you. In their villages along the Don, their autonomy occurs because they are the defense for the Tsar.

In War, I am unsure the term WWI was used, but the horrors the Cossacks faced in the ‘meaningless war’ drove a rift that the Bolsheviks then capitalized on.

For the remainder of the tale, the divide the Cossacks feel from the loyalty sense is where I divined my best enjoyment of the tale. During the Revolution, the Cossacks had to pick between a Tsar now gone and the Red Army. In the Civil War, the Reds and the Whites fought and village to village was torn apart as sides were picked.

I cannot say ‘enjoyable’ would be the term of my reading, but ‘enlightening’ would work as it provided me with another layer in my history knowledge.