Mikhail Sholokhov

Sholokhov grew up among the Don Cossacks he later chronicled, joining the Bolsheviks as a teenager and taking part in the brutal grain requisitioning of the Civil War years before he'd published a word. He began And Quiet Flows the Don in his early twenties, and its scope and command were so far beyond what a writer that young seemed capable of that rumors he had stolen the manuscript from a dead White Cossack officer dogged him for the rest of his life.

The authorship controversy never fully died, kept alive by dissidents including Solzhenitsyn, though later stylometric analysis largely supported Sholokhov's claim. Unlike most other chroniclers of the Soviet century, he remained a loyal, favored Party member throughout (he publicly denounced writers tried for anti-Soviet activity), and was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 1965, the state's approval as complete as any Russian writer of his era ever received.