who reads sholokhov today?

I just finished reading Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don (1929). Why, you might ask. Because I bought it 30 years ago and thought at the time I should read it. It seemed like it might be informative to find out, if I could, why I bought it. The answer wasn't hard to find. Here was the first great attempt at Soviet epic in the novel. It only took us up to the moment when the Bolsheviks were about to take over, but it tried manfully to suggest that the Bolshevizing of Russia was also going to coincide with and preserve the cossack tradition of the Don River area. Sholokhov was at least honest in portraying the easy violence which that old form of life was given to slipping into, and he was not very flattering to the early revolutionary Reds who, in more than one incident, massacred their prisoners. But, the book does finally do its social realist duty and portray a coming heroic nation rising out of the abuses of czarism and the massive slaughter that was World War I. The most "real" thing in the book for me was Sholokhov's grasp of the old life of the Don River area where cossacks and peasants acted out the roles assigned for them under czarist rule. A rough life, a rough read.