Mikhail Sholokhov was the only Soviet establishment writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1965), which recognized his controversial, monumental twentieth-century Cossack epic Tikhii Don (1928, 1929, 1933, 1940; translated as And Quiet Flows the Don, 1930; translated as The Don Flows Home to the Sea, 1941), a novel that records the struggle of the Don Cossacks from almost the beginning of World War I through the Soviet Revolution to the 1930s. Sholokhov received the award, although the authorship of his first and arguably best work came under question. Not a prolific writer, he wrote two additional novels, a few short stories, and journalistic pieces; yet, by 1958 he was perhaps the best-known and most widely read Soviet writer. By 1965 circulation of his works reached approximately forty-two million copies, and they had been translated into some fifty-six languages. By 1980 approximately seventy-nine million copies had been printed in eighty-four languages.

Sholokhov joined the Communist Party in...