MIKHAIL SHOLOKHOV, 78; NOBELIST, AUTHOR OF QUIET FLOWS THE DON'
Author: Associated Press
Date: Wednesday, February 22, 1984
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER OBITUARY
Soviet author Mikhail Sholokhov, a Communist Party stalwart who wrote "Quiet
Flows the Don" and won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1965, has died at age
78.
The death was announced yesterday by Radio Moscow's English-language
service, which referred to him as "the great Soviet writer." Official Soviet
sources said he died Monday night at Rostov-on-Don, the southern city where he
lived most of his life. No cause of death was given.
The Soviet news agency Tass said Sholokhov had suffered "a grave and long
illness." Tass said burial would be tomorrow in the village of Veshenkskaya,
his longtime home near Rostov-on-Don.
Mr. Sholokhov was the only officially sanctioned Soviet writer to win the
Nobel Prize in literature. He received the award in 1965, 30 years after
publication of the first of four volumes of "Quiet Flows the Don."
The epic, which depicted Don River Cossacks caught up in the civil war
that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, was completed in 1940 and
translated into at least 73 languages. It appeared in a two-volume English
translation, "And Quiet Flows the Don" and "The Don Flows Home to The Sea."
Asked his reaction to receiving the Nobel, Mr. Sholokhov said: "I smiled,
sighed quietly - and thought it was too late."
Exiled Soviet dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the prize in
1970, but did not formally receive the prize until after he was exiled from
the Soviet Union in l974. Boris Pasternak, whose major work, "Doctor Zhivago,"
never officially has been published in the Soviet Union, won the prize in 1958
but under pressure refused to accept it.
Mr. Sholokhov was a friend of former leader Nikita S. Khrushchev and
accompanied him to the United States in 1959.
"I am first and foremost a Communist," he told a party meeting in 1962.
"Only thereafter am I a writer."
Mr. Sholokhov became a member of the Communist Party in 1932, and in 1949
joined the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1961, he was elected to the
Communist Party Central Committee, the group that ousted Khrushchev in 1964.
A few months before his death, he appealed to world writers to use their
talents to influence people against "enemies of peace" who threaten nuclear
war. Earlier, he had lent his name to the official Soviet peace movement.
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