Tikhi Don was the first cinema adaptation of one of the most famous Russian novels (more precisely the first half of it, the only part written by that time; the epic story was eventually in four volumes). In 1965 its author Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984) would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The plot: Grigori Melekhov, the descendant of a Cossack family, would like to marry Aksinia. However, she is already married to Stepan, and Grigori’s father forces his son to marry Natalia. World War I intervenes, and at the battlefront Grigori understands the unfair situation, since peasants and Cossacks have been mobilized only to protect the properties of the rich. However, the personal and existential dismay of Grigori is relentlessly heading towards an unexpected turning point, thanks to upcoming historical events.
For the first time the world of the Russian peasantry living in nature was revealed onscreen. As in their previous film, Babi ryazanskie (Women of Ryazan, 1927), the plot of Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ivan Pravov’s version of Sholokhov’s book documented an actual way of life, pushed to the depiction of physiological elements. Local extras enthusiastically reproduced their lives in front of the camera. Even before the films of Dovzhenko, for the first time in Soviet cinema the landscape here turns from being the background of the narrative into an active character. The patriarchal world is taken to the limit of the historical upheavals that destroyed it, the scope of human passions not fitting into a measured life woven into the cycle of nature. A noted actress in pre-Revolutionary silents, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, with her theatrical background – she had attended the schools of Stanislavsky and later Meyerhold – understood and had a particular flair for working with actors. In the team’s films, a whole new galaxy of talented screen stars was discovered and shone for the first time. Both Babi ryazanskie and Tikhi Don were innovative films, and were successful nationally and internationally.
The production of Tikhi Don was conceived in 1929, when foreign companies insisted on mutual collaborations with the directors and cast of Babi ryazanskie (which had been successfully distributed in Europe under the title The Village of Sin). An agreement was reached with the German distribution company Derussa, an essential condition of which was the participation in the film of Emma Tsesarskaya, who had played the main character of Babi ryazanskie and was the most important actress discovered by Preobrazhenskaya and Pravov. Mikhail Sholokhov, on the eve of a long business trip to Germany, readily approved this choice, as well as that for the other main character, the young stage actor Andrei Abrikosov, the future star not only of Preobrazhenskaya and Pravov’s subsequent films, but also of works by Sergei Eisenstein and Ivan Pyriev. The novelist also recommended the shooting location, the Cossack farm Dichensk on the banks of a tributary of the Don, the Seversky Donets river. The inhabitants of the farm enthusiastically joined in as performers and local consultants.
However, by the time work was completed in 1930, the political situation in the country was dramatically different. The cooperation with the foreign company had to be refused. The executives were now focusing on agitation and propaganda titles, and the story of passion was now clearly considered outdated. “The driving force in the decisive, principal episodes of the film are the physiological motives, which in no way rise to the level of social generalization. Where the viewer tries to make such generalizations, he will inevitably come to conclusions that they are in no way consonant with the ideology of the proletariat,” wrote the magazine Proletarskoie Kino. The verdict was categorical: “Each Soviet film must mobilize for the construction of the present or incite hatred for the past. This film does neither.”
At preview screenings for workers, a common practice at the time, the audience greeted the picture with enthusiasm, literally booing and chasing off the stage the representatives of ARRK (Assotsiatsiya rabotnikov revolyutsionnoi kinematografii / Association of Workers of Revolutionary Cinematography), the bearers of the official point of view. But the official ideologists had the last word. Preobrazhenskaya and Pravov were eventually expelled from the Association “for subservience to petty bourgeois audiences”. Only the intervention of Sholokhov, who had returned from Germany, allowed the film to be released after a six-month ban.
However, the film was sold abroad immediately upon completion, and sound was even added in France. This sound version was also released on Soviet screens in 1933.

Venice 1932  During the first Venice International Film Exhibition, there was considerable curiosity about Russian cinema from both the public and the critics, even though only two films were sent from the Soviet Union.
Screened on the 12th evening, Wednesday 17 August, the historical reconstruction of which version of Tikhi Don was actually shown in 1932 is perhaps the most intriguing issue among the titles included in our Giornate programme.
Shortly after the end of the 1932 event, Eugenio Giovannetti wrote in the Italian magazine Pegaso: rassegna di lettere e arti that “even in this film [as well as in the other Russian film, Putyovka v Zhizn (Road to Life)] the word participates little, and almost always with choral value. Here, I would say, was the highest lesson that came to us from the two Russian titles: discreet, almost symbolic words, and pantheistic music, emerging, through things and animals, from the maelstrom of action. The all-talking technology, which for all other peoples is a barrier between cinema and art, for the Russians is the symphonic life of things. Russian cinema is the only one that has enriched itself with sound and words, and which has found the essential cinematic music.”
Apart from the continual comparison with the other Russian film shown at Venice, Nikolai Ekk’s Putyovka v Zhizn (1931), which was featured in practically all contemporary reviews of Tikhi Don, consistently overshadowing it (Putyovka v Zhizn was the real “winner” of the entire first edition of the Venice festival), the reviews seem to imply that Tikhi Don was also shown, albeit to a limited extent, in a sound version.
However, in addition to the fact that the sound version of Tikhi Don was distributed only starting from 14 September 1933, a full year after the Venice showing, in the same text by Giovannetti in Pegaso, as well as in other articles published closer to the screening (for example, Il Gazzettino, 18 August 1932), it is clearly stated that the print screened in Venice was battered and had flash or completely removed intertitles, in the place of which often dazzling and annoying white leader remained.
Perhaps the term “word”, in Giovannetti’s use of it, must be understood as “dialogue” (it does not matter if in sound or written form); then, in this case, the silent version was plainly shown. Or perhaps, and this is pure speculation, the print sent from Moscow at the time had been put together with the insertion, into a silent copy, of sporadic music and sound effects. But, if so, no trace or documentation of such a print has survived.

The print  Tikhi Don is being presented at the Giornate thanks to a very rare vintage print in the collections of the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam that was donated to the archive in 1967. This is the silent version of the film, which was held at the Amsterdam office of Sovexport for screenings in the Netherlands. It features a full-frame image and Russian intertitles with “burned-in” Dutch subtitles.

Yevgeni Margolit, Federico Striuli