Tales From The Don

ISBN: 9780349131658 • Condition: Good • Sold by Crappy Old Books™

Behold the Don River: a very long body of water with an even longer memory. In Tales from the Don, Sholokhov stands on its banks and skims stories like flat stones—Cossack-sized, smooth with use, occasionally skipping farther than seems physically possible. Horses clatter through the pages; so do songs, feuds, fieldwork, weddings that feel like ambushes, and ambushes that feel oddly festive. People fall in love, fall out of love, and periodically just fall—usually into trouble, sometimes into the river.

These are compact dramas with wide horizons. Sholokhov, who never met a quiet afternoon he couldn’t turn into folklore, writes with the raised-eyebrow patience of a neighbor who has seen it all and is happy to tell you most of it. His Don Cossacks are gloriously contradictory: proud and practical, tender and combustible, loyal until lunchtime and then loyal again by supper. The humor sneaks up sideways; the tragedy is never theatrical, just inevitable, like weather moving over the steppe.

Expect the great essentials—honor that bruises easily, vodka that doesn’t, fields that insist on being harvested even when history is making other plans. And language that can shift from lark to lament between commas. If a character pauses to consider the moral order of the universe, it’s only because the horse needed a breather.

This Abacus edition (1983) arrives in Good condition, which in the Crappy Old Books™ vernacular means: lightly river-worn but structurally sound; the sort of copy that looks as if it once spent a thoughtful afternoon in a coat pocket. You may detect a noble spine crease (decorative), some foxing freckles (distinguished), and that incomparable paperback perfume known as library after a thunderstorm.

Read it if you like short stories that carry the weight of a novel and the speed of a rumor. Keep it if you prefer your realism both mud-splattered and lyrical, where a joke can gallop beside a heartbreak and neither one breaks stride. Then leave it on the coffee table. Visitors will assume you understand rivers, horses, and people—especially the parts that cannot be explained, only told.

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