ABSTRACT
Sholokhov is a Soviet writer in another meaning of the term than Babel. He began to work when the Soviet power had established itself, and his acceptance of that power simplified the issues for him. Babel’s prose, seldom releasing more than ten words to a sentence, matches even Pushkin’s for laconism; and it exactly answers to Zamyatin’s specification. The opening parts of Sholokhov’s narrative put one in mind sometimes of Thomas Hardy: they stress the realities of rustic life, the necessary round that must go on whatever the human heart may feel. Sholokhov understands the Don and its people with every pore of his body; knows intimately the voices, the tread, and especially the smell peculiar to Cossack men and women; and is a patriot of their soil. Sholokhov matches the frankness of his apprehension, his natural poet’s eye with a rigidity of mind that reduces tragic complexity in the end to simple politics.
