Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (; – 21 February 1984) was a Russian novelist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the period of collectivization, primarily in his most famous novel, And Quiet Flows the Don. Life and work Sholokhov was born in Russian Empire, in the "land of the Cossacks" – the Kruzhilin hamlet, part of stanitsa Vyoshenskaya, in the former Administrative Region of the Don Cossack Host. His father, a Russian, Aleksander Mikhailovich Sholokhov (1865–1925), was a member of the lower middle class, at different times a farmer, a cattle trader, and a miller. Sholokhov's mother, Anastasia Danilovna Chernikova (1871–1942), the widow of a Cossack, came from Ukrainian peasant stock (her father was a peasant in the Chernihiv oblast). She did not become literate until a point in her life when she wanted to correspond with her son. His family were not Don Cossacks, but inogorodnye ("outlanders"), the rather disparaging term used by the Don Cossacks for outsiders who settled in their territory by the banks of the Don. The inogorodyne tended to be much poorer than the Don Cossacks and were excluded from voting for officials in the Host government (the Don Cossack Host were allowed to elect its leaders, except for the ataman who headed the Host, who was always appointed by the Emperor). Sholokhov attended schools in , Moscow, Boguchar, and Veshenskaya until 1918, when he joined the Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War at the age of 13. He spent the next few years fighting. During the Russian Civil War, the inogorodnye tended to support the Reds while the Don Cossacks tended to support the Whites. Sholokhov began writing at 17. He completed his first literary work, the short story "The Birthmark", at 19. In 1922 Sholokhov moved to Moscow to become a journalist, but he had to support himself through manual labour. He was a stevedore, a stonemason, and an accountant from 1922 to 1924, but he also intermittently participated in writers' "seminars". His first published work was a satirical article, The Test (19 October 1923). In 1924 Sholokhov returned to Veshenskaya and devoted himself entirely to writing. In the same year he married Maria Petrovna Gromoslavskaia (1901–1992), the daughter of Pyotr Gromoslavsky, the ataman of Bukanovskaya village. They had two daughters