Sholokhov's book introduces the reader to a New World that is not merely the Don Region, but the world of the author's inimitably poetic prose; giving fifteen years of his life to the creation of And Quiet Flows the Don. He began the first book at the age of twenty, in 1926. The last was finished in 1940. While Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace (1863-69) immortalized the Napoleonic campaigns to the eve of the Decembrist revolt, And Quiet Flows the Don showed the destruction of the Cossacks and the birth of a new society.