And Quiet Flows the Don

On the Don River at the close of the tsarist era, Gregor Melekhov is a headstrong young Cossack whose affair with Aksinia, the wife of a neighbor, sets a feud burning even as his father marries him off to Natalya. Then history arrives. Gregor fights through World War I, the Revolution, and the civil war, changing allegiance from Red to White and back until no side will hold him. Sholokhov traces the whole Cossack world around him, the farms, the feuds, the songs, and the slaughter, building a panorama of a people caught between an empire's collapse and the new order that crushes the old way of life.