Farm Kruzhilinsky. The village of Veshenskaya. On May 11, 1905, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov appeared - the illegitimate child of the wife of a Don Cossack, half-nurse Anastasia Dmitrievna Kuznetsova and a wealthy brother-in-law Alexander Mikhailovich Sholokhov. Later, he will change his mother’s surname to his father’s one, become an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, winner of the Nobel, Lenin and Stalin Prizes and twice Hero of Socialist Labor.
Childhood and education
Mikhail Alexandrovich was given the status of an illegitimate child, so he was given the name of his mother, and thanks to her, he inherited the land allotment as “Cossack son”. In 1912, mother and father married, and Misha, becoming the son of a craftsman, lost Cossack privileges, but acquired a biological father and the legal name "Sholokhov."
Sholokhov senior worked for hire, so the family often moved from one locality to another. Mikhail Alexandrovich was diligent in training, but this did not prevent him from frolicing for days on the street in the company of neighboring guys, which was then reflected in his works. He graduated from four classes of a male gymnasium.
Maturity: interesting facts
In the 1917 revolution, Sholokhov did not speak for either the Reds or the Whites, he simply joined the winning side at the end. In 1922, he served in the food detachment, where he slightly exceeded his official duties: arbitrarily reduced the taxation on people of high position. For this he was sentenced to death, but thanks to a small fraud of his parents with birth documents, it turned out that they were going to execute a minor, and young Mikhail Sholokhov escaped with a year of unpaid community service.
Having joined the Bolshevik party in 1930, he had an excellent reputation: he did not oppose the world views of the party, was not attested to by a participant in anti-revolutionary movements. Sholokhov wanted to continue the educational process, but could not get into the preparatory courses of the labor school due to the lack of necessary documents, so he then had to earn money for his life with hard manual work, constantly changing one profession for another. But, even in such a difficult time for Mikhail Alexandrovich, he did not cease to engage in self-education.
Creative way: success story
In 1923, Sholokhov began to compose feuilletons, which were published in the youth newspaper Youthful Truth. In his early works, he clearly distinguishes the division of Sholokhov characters into heroes and antiheroes, who often have prototypes. A favorite plot of Mikhail Alexandrovich is the deadly clash of his closest relatives.
In 1928, in the Soviet literary and artistic publication October, the first pair of volumes of the epic novel titled The Quiet Don was published, which brought the Nobel Prize to Mikhail Alexandrovich in 1965. By value, The Quiet Flows the Don is often correlated with the creation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. The publication of the first volumes of Sholokhov's work in the journal Oktyabr caused a huge response from the audience, and doubts about the real author of the work flashed in the literary society. The work was sent for examination and concluded that the authorship still belongs to Sholokhov.
In the 1930s and 1950s, Mikhail Aleksandrovich created another great novel, Virgin Soil Upturned. This work is devoted to the collectivization of the peasant layer. Takes second place after the “Quiet Don”.
The military-related works received considerable recognition, for example, “The fate of man”, Where an ordinary person appeared to the reader in genuine and incomprehensible to himself moral morality.
Death
Before his death, Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov lived in the Veshensky rural settlement, loved long walks on the street, was engaged in hunting and fishing.
Since the 1960s, he practically stopped writing, and presented society with all his awards: the Nobel Prize, for example, was spent on building a school. The cause of death of Mikhail Alexandrovich was throat cancer.
