And Quiet Flows the Don: Sholokhov's Cossack Stanitsas

The novel opens in Tatarsky, the hamlet of the Melekhovs, a Cossack family whose founder, Prokofy, brings a Turkish wife home from a campaign. Neighbours suspect her of witchcraft and try to lynch her; Prokofy cuts his way through to save her. Their descendants are nicknamed "Turks", and the feud and love stories of the whole book grow from this household. Tatarsky is invented. Sholokhov places it in the Vyoshenskaya parish, so the pin marks the stanitsa as a stand-in for the Upper Don countryside.

Location precision: Tatarsky exists only in the novel; the pin marks Vyoshenskaya, the stanitsa it belongs to in the story.

Grigory Melekhov, a promising young Cossack, falls in love with Aksinia, wife of Stepan Astakhov, a family friend who regularly beats her. Their romance and elopement start a feud between the families, and it follows both of them through war and revolution. The 1983 sculpture of the pair, first set up in Rostov-on-Don, was moved to Vyoshenskaya in 1995 and stands on the bank of the Don, the river of the book's title.

Location precision: Sources place the sculpture on the Don bank in Vyoshenskaya without an address; the pin marks the stanitsa.

Visitor guidance: The monument stands on the Don bank in Vyoshenskaya.

In 1919 Cossacks of the Upper Don rose against the Bolsheviks from Vyoshenskaya. They felt betrayed: they had been promised that the Upper Don would be spared military action and decossackization. The uprising and its leader, Pavel Kudinov, appear in the novel, where Grigory fights on one side, then the other, changing sides four times in all. Grigory is reportedly modelled on two real Veshenskaya Cossacks. Today Vyoshenskaya is a quiet stanitsa on the left bank of the Don.

Location precision: Vyoshenskaya is a whole stanitsa; the pin marks its centre.

Visitor guidance: Vyoshenskaya lies on the Don and holds the memorials and museum of Sholokhov.

Sholokhov began the book in October 1925 while living in Karginskaya, and the idea for the novel came to him in the house where he lived. The stanitsa is also in the plot: in December 1919 Grigory and Aksinya pass through it by sleigh, retreating from Tatarsky to the south.

Visitor guidance: Karginskaya holds a memorial complex with Sholokhov's house and the old mill, part of the Sholokhov museum-reserve.

The final version of the novel was begun on 6 November 1926 in Vyoshenskaya, where Sholokhov had just settled. The family moved to the house at 103 Sholokhova Street in 1928, and he wrote the last books of the novel there. The fourth volume was finished in 1940. After his death in 1984 the museum-reserve was created in the stanitsa; the house is one of its memorial buildings today.

Visitor guidance: Memorial house on Sholokhova Street, run as part of the Sholokhov museum-reserve.