Beside the Quiet Don

On the river Don, deep in Cossack country, in the tiny village of Veshenskaya, lives gentle-mannered Mikhail Sholokhov. There, under the straw which roofs his three-room cottage, Sholokhov watches the great river swell and wither with the seasons and writes novels (such as And Quiet Flows the Don) which are the closest approach to enduring literature that revolutionary Russia has produced. An impressed American once said of Sholokhov: "He writes for no censorship except truth."

But in revolutionary Russia, truth is what the Communist Party's Agitation and Propaganda section says it should be. In remote, snowclad Veshenskaya, Sholokhov was summoned to lend his powerful pen and his novelist's imagery to the clamor that is party truth in 1948. Sholokhov obliged. Last week, the Soviet radio carried his new message:

"Let not our hatred of our foe grow cold even if he has been hanged. Let it continue to rage with a tenfold fury . . . towards those who have not yet satisfied their lust for profits derived from the blood of millions and who, in their satanic and blind folly, are preparing a new war for suffering humanity. . . . The time will surely come for their inevitable death by hanging. . . . Let our indestructible hatred of them continue. It will come in handy at the right moment.

"Last year on the Don I witnessed a symbolic picture. I saw a half-filled grave, and by it lay a German helmet. In the grave lay a skeleton, only partly covered by the shreds of what was once the grey-green uniform of a German soldier. A sharp-edged fragment of a Soviet shell had shattered his face. The gaping mouth of the skeleton was filled with fertile loam and from this was already rising a curling shoot of convolvulus, bearing its delicate flowers.

"Yes, indeed, we possess a great deal of fertile earth, and we have more than sufficient of it to stuff the mouths of all who would dare pass from talk of fatal encounters to action."

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