The Don Flows Home to the Sea, Vol. 1

Sholokhov's book introduces the reader to a New World that is not merely the Don Region, but the world of the author's inimitably poetic prose; giving fifteen years of his life to the creation of "And Quiet Flows the Don." He began the first book at the age of twenty, in 1926. The last was finished in 1940. While Leo Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace" (1863-69) immortalized the Napoleonic campaigns to the eve of the Decembrist revolt, "And Quiet Flows the Don" showed the destruction of the Cossacks and the birth of a new society. "The Don Flows Home to the Sea," part two of the original novel, describes the effect of World War I, the revolution, and the civil war on the lives of the Don Cossacks.