The novel deals with the life of the Cossacks living in the Don River valley during the early 20th century, starting around 1912, just prior to World War I.

The plot revolves around the Melekhov family of Tatarsk, who are descendants of a Cossack who, to the horror of many, took a Turkish captive as a wife during the Crimean War.

The second eldest son, Grigory Panteleevich Melekhov, is a promising young soldier who falls in love with Aksinia, the wife of Stepan Astakhov, a family friend.

Natalya dies after a failed amateur abortion, leaving Grigory with two small children who are eventually cared for 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.

[citation needed] And Quiet Flows the Don grew out of an earlier, unpublished work, the Donshina:I began the novel by describing the event of the Kornilov putsch in 1917.

)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.

[2][3] Like the Tolstoy novel, And Quiet Flows the Don is an epic of Russian life during a tempestuous era of crisis, and examines it through political, military, romantic, and civilian lenses.

Solzhenitsyn and others accused Sholokhov of plagiarizing a novel by Fyodor Kryukov, a more obscure author who fought against Bolshevism and died in 1920.

[4] An investigation in the late 1920s upheld Sholokhov's authorship of "Silent Don", and the allegations were denounced as malicious slander in Pravda.

by Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson were adapted from the cossack folk "Koloda duda" (Ukrainian: "колода дуда") song sung by Daria in And Quiet Flows the Don Part 1, Chapter 3 (page 17 Knopf edition).