From the time when it first began to appear in 1928 The Quiet Don has posed a whole series of riddles which have not been satisfactorily answered even today. The reading public found itself confronted with something unprecedented in the history of literature. A twenty-three-year-old beginner had created a work out of material which went far beyond his own experience of life and his level of education (four years at school)…. [The book] could have been written only by someone closely acquainted with many sections of pre-Revolutionary society in the Don region, [for it is] a book whose most impressive quality was its deep insight into the way of life and the psychology of the characters it portrayed.

Although in terms of his origins and his personal record he himself was an "outsider", a non-Cossack, the emotional force of the young author's novel was directed against the influence of...