Den azurblå stäppen och andra noveller

Häftad bok. Tidens Forlag Stockholm. 1965. 126 sidor.

Nära nyskick. MICHAIL SJOLOCHOV

This selection of stories by Mikhail Sholochov is taken from his first collections of short stories, which were published in 1925-26. It was a young and precocious debut. But like most young writers during the first years of the Soviet republic, he already had behind him a motley and varied biography.

He was born in the land of the Don Cossacks, in the village of Vesjen-skaja. However, the father was not a genuine Cossack. He belonged to the large crowds of land-hungry South Russian farmers who, after 1867, when the ban on land acquisition in the Don area was lifted, flocked here to seek an opportunity for existence. As a cattle dealer, merchant and farmer, he was well off enough to be able to give his son a good school education for the time. However, the In-Civil War soon interrupted the studies. As a sixteen-year-old, Sholokhov accompanied the requisition patrols that roamed the countryside to ensure that the peasants handed over their grain deliveries to the state. The task was not one of the more pleasant; rebellious peasant unions still made the countryside insecure. It is said that Sholokhov was once captured by the peasant leader Makhno and his gang; young Sholokhov's combat skills during the interrogation of the peasant leader himself must have saved his life that time.

At the age of seventeen, he came to Moscow and tried a number of different professions. At the same time, he began working with Komsomolskaya Pravda, the organ of the Komsomol movement. There Alexander Serafimovich, one of the leading figures of Russian workers' poetry, got hold of him, encouraged him and saw to it that his first collection of stories from the Don was published. It had