I usually take Tolstoy’s advice. When picking up a book, I say to the author: come on then, introduce yourself; tell me what sort of a person you are.

Impossible to do that with the author of the Soviet classic, Quiet Flows the Don.  Impossible to fathom a writer like Mikhail Sholokhov. Who is he exactly? The man who weaves the terrible, bloody events of the Russian Revolution and ensuing civil war into an almost unbelievably tender love story; the man who dared criticise Stalin on behalf of the Russian people? Or is he the angry communist who called for writers dissenting against the Soviet cause to be put up against the wall? What on earth can we make of Mikhail Sholokhov, Stalin’s favourite author and writer of one of the twentieth century’s most humane masterpieces?