Don Cossack

AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON--Mikhail Sholokhov--Knopf ($3).

What the late great Tolstoy's War and Peace did for old Russia, And Quiet Flows the Don attempts for new. Not nearly as long (755 pp.) as Tolstoy's epic. Author Sholokhov's novel is big enough to house comfortably over 50 principal characters. More typical of the traditional Russian novel than the Sovietized product, And Quiet Flows the Don hymns no paean to the Five Year Plan. Its ponderously simple narrative follows the fortunes of the Don Cossacks from peace to war to revolution, leaves them in the midst of civil strife. Though it is far from made-to-order propaganda, the book has sold a million copies in U. S. S. R., has been translated into seven languages.

Young Gregor Melekhov was a typical Don Cossack, hard-riding, hard-drinking, fiercely independent. Before he was old enough to serve his term in the army he was making free with another man's wife. His father thought marriage would cool him off, but his wife, after his mistress, was a disappointment to Gregor. He soon abandoned her and went off with the hot-blooded Aksinia to a nearby estate, where he got a job as coachman. When his term for military service fell due, he said goodbye to Aksinia with no misgivings. But Gregor was gone too long; before his service was up Russia was at war with Germany. Gregor made a good soldier, won four Crosses of St. George. Home on leave he found Aksinia had not been able to wait for him. He gave himself the satisfaction of thrashing her gentleman lover before returning to the army.

Long before the revolution was a fact, Gregor and many of his mates, fed up with the war, had listened to much sub versive talk. But Cossacks knew them selves to be the flower of the army, despised the peasants, cared little for the rest of Russia. Torn between the conflicting commands of Kerensky. Kornilov and the Bolsheviks. Gregor did not know what to do with his loyalty. When his regiment broke up he joined the Red Guards, but shooting down men of his own blood went I against his grain. He took the excuse of a furlough for wounds to go home and stay i there. Soon the Cossacks, their local ! patriotism roused by an invasion of the Reds, were forced willy-nilly into savage civil war, with Cossack massacring Cossack. But Gregor had had enough, took no part in this suicidal killing. Returned to his wife and his native village, he waited, puzzled, for peace.

The Author. Mikhail Sholokhov writes as one having authority. A Don Cossack like his hero, he has been through the same mill. His accounts of cavalry fighting, of the drifting suspense of the soldiers returning from the front to a revolution they did not understand, of the bloody skirmishes between Reds and Whites, in which no prisoners long survived, of ruthless massacres by both sides, read like eyewitness reports.

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