The Don Flows Home to the Sea, Vol. 2

Rating:
Summary: Bleak Civil War
Review: This is the sequel to "And Quiet Flows the Don", and carries the story of the group of Don Cossacks into the period of Civil War in Russia which followed the Bolshevik Revolution.

If you're into war novels, you should enjoy this book. Basically, it's a long tale of the depravities of war, treachery infidelity, misfortune and atrocity. There is no way that the reader can retain a romanticised image of war after slogging through this. The horrors of war are made that bit more tragic by the fact that this was a civil war - towns, villages and even families were divided. Loyalties to the White Russians and to the Red Army were themselves ambiguous and mutable.

Sholokhov interrupts his narrative frequently with descriptions of the flora and fauna, and the seasonal changes in the Don area, as if to say that whatever humans get up to, Mother Nature just continues her work. I got the message Sholokhov was trying to impart about the insignificance of human obsessions quite early on, and found that the repeated descriptions of nature in the novel became more contrived and lost their effect as a result.

I think that the problem I had with the novel was its very bleakness. I have no problem with depicting war as it is rather than dressing it up in romantic verbiage, but as this story slogged its way on from one battle description and tale of inhumanity to the next, I struggled to keep going. There's no redeeming character in the whole novel - you feel that as unfortunate as all the characters were, their faults made you unsympathetic with their fates (the only possible exception is Gregor's wife, Natalia Melekhova, and as a whole the men are depicted far less sympathetically than the women - women's place in society made them greater victims).

I found myself torn between being depressed at Sholokhov's pessimistic vision of humanity, and thinking that in a civil war situation, such a conclusion would be almost inevitable. In all, the novel hardly an uplifting read: perhaps, with present world events, I was in need of something more optimistic.

Rating:
Summary: Bleak Civil War
Review: This is the sequel to "And Quiet Flows the Don", and carries the story of the group of Don Cossacks into the period of Civil War in Russia which followed the Bolshevik Revolution.

If you're into war novels, you should enjoy this book. Basically, it's a long tale of the depravities of war, treachery infidelity, misfortune and atrocity. There is no way that the reader can retain a romanticised image of war after slogging through this. The horrors of war are made that bit more tragic by the fact that this was a civil war - towns, villages and even families were divided. Loyalties to the White Russians and to the Red Army were themselves ambiguous and mutable.

Sholokhov interrupts his narrative frequently with descriptions of the flora and fauna, and the seasonal changes in the Don area, as if to say that whatever humans get up to, Mother Nature just continues her work. I got the message Sholokhov was trying to impart about the insignificance of human obsessions quite early on, and found that the repeated descriptions of nature in the novel became more contrived and lost their effect as a result.

I think that the problem I had with the novel was its very bleakness. I have no problem with depicting war as it is rather than dressing it up in romantic verbiage, but as this story slogged its way on from one battle description and tale of inhumanity to the next, I struggled to keep going. There's no redeeming character in the whole novel - you feel that as unfortunate as all the characters were, their faults made you unsympathetic with their fates (the only possible exception is Gregor's wife, Natalia Melekhova, and as a whole the men are depicted far less sympathetically than the women - women's place in society made them greater victims).

I found myself torn between being depressed at Sholokhov's pessimistic vision of humanity, and thinking that in a civil war situation, such a conclusion would be almost inevitable. In all, the novel hardly an uplifting read: perhaps, with present world events, I was in need of something more optimistic.