The Quiet Don is the first film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Michail Šolochov, a recognized masterpiece of Soviet literature and the social realist equivalent of War and Peace. In 1965 Šolochov won the Nobel Prize: a political choice, given that outside the USSR the book was not known by either the public or the critics. In 1930, however, only the first of four volumes was completed, the least political and the most melodramatic of them. Preobraženskaja and Pravov focused on the melodrama. The Quiet Don is the direct offshoot of The Women of Ryazan. The two films, together with the sound film Vraž’i tropy (1935), form a sort of “rural trilogy”. The filmmakers were both praised and criticized mainly for their ethnographic approach. The directors and actors actually only knew the reality of country living from what they read in books: Emma Cesarskaja, for example, who after. The Quiet Don was to be considered the classic Cossack woman, had grown up in a cultured Jewish family and before the shooting took place had never set foot in any village. For the directors the countryside was a world of instincts, spontaneity and primitive passions. The Women of Ryazan centered on sensuality, Vraž’i tropy on hatred (predictably, given that the film was based on the novel Hatred by Ivan Šuchov). In The Quiet Don the two elements are intertwined. It’s interesting that the prologue, at first glance insignificant, and even dropped in the 1933 sound version, begins with a poetic love scene and ends with a murder. In this rural trilogy pure physiology rules, gently pushing the melodrama at times toward tragedy, at times toward grotesque and bitter comedy. The latter is particularly evident in the wedding scenes, key in all three films. In The Women of Ryazan the wedding party is notably depicted as a suffocating affair: the lovely bride is continually wiping the sweat off her doll-like face, while a woman dancing maniacally has to catch her breath, mouth agape, while whirling her arms and spinning her eyes in circles, before resuming her frenetic dance. In The Quiet Don a drunken farmer has to drive the nuptial cortege, and his wife, in order to bring him back to some level of normalcy, sticks two fingers down his throat. The Quiet Don’s popularity only grew with passing time, and Cesarskaja and Abrikosov would long be associated with Aksina and Grigorij, even as late as 1957- 58 when the new adaptation was released – in color and with sound – directed by Sergej Gerasimov. But the earlier film met with a cruel fate. The years 1930-31 represented a difficult period for Soviet cinema and for the avant-garde: foreign film distribution was suspended; Zemlja (Earth) by Dovženko was trashed by the critics and censors; Prostoj slucˇaj (A Simple Case) by Pudovkin was banned. Even The Quiet Don was pulled from the theaters, albeit not permanently, and the two directors were expelled from the Association of Revolutionary Cinema Workers for “subservience to petty bourgeois audiences”.

                                                                                                                                             Pëtr Bagrov