by Aksinia. This does not prevent Grigory and Aksinia from trying a final escape alone together, but she is killed by a stray bullet during a fight with Red troops. Grief-stricken, Grigory buries her and returns home, with his prospects unclear. The book deals not only with the struggles and suffering of the Cossacks but also the landscape itself, which is vividly brought to life. There are also many folk songs referenced throughout the novel. And Quiet Flows the Don grew out of an earlier, unpublished work, the Donshina:I began the novel by describing the event of the Kornilov putsch in 1917. Then it became clear that this putsch, and more importantly, the role of the Cossacks in these events, would not be understood without a Cossack prehistory, and so I began with the description of the life of the Don Cossacks just before the beginning of World War I. (quote from M.A. Sholokhov: Seminarii, (1962) by F.A. Abramovic and V.V. Gura, quoted in Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, by L.L. Litus.) Protagonist Grigory Melekhov is reportedly based on two Cossacks from Veshenskaya, Pavel Nazarovich Kudinov and Kharlampii Vasilyevich Yermakov, who were key figures in the anti-Bolshevist struggle of the upper Don. Literary significance, criticism, and accusations of plagiarism The novel has been compared to War and Peace (1869), written by Leo Tolstoy, notably by Maxim Gorky. Like the Tolstoy novel, And Quiet Flows the Don is an epic picture of Russian life during a time of crisis and examines it through political, military, romantic, and civilian lenses. Various rumours of plagiarism began circulating from 1930. Solzhenitsyn and others accused Sholokhov of plagiarizing a novel by Fyodor Kryukov, a more obscure author who fought against Bolshevism and died in 1920. An investigation in the late 1920s upheld Sholokhov's authorship of "Silent Don", and the allegations were denounced as malicious slander in Pravda. During the Second World War, Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid, and only the fourth volume survived. Sholokhov had his friend Vassily Kudashov look after it. Following Kudashov's death in the war, his widow took possession of the manuscript, but she never disclosed her ownership. The manuscript was finally found by the Institute of World Literature of Russian Academy of Sciences in 1999 with assistance from the Russian Government. The writing paper dates back to the 1920s. 605 pages are in Sholokhov's own hand, evidencing considerable re-drafting and