The Fate of a Man

"The Fate of a Man" is a story by the Soviet Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov. Written in 1956–1957. First published in the newspaper “Pravda” in the issues dated December 31, 1956 and January 1, 1957.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, driver Andrei Sokolov has to part with his family and go to the front. In the first months of the war he is wounded and taken prisoner by the fascists. In captivity he endures all the hardships of a concentration camp. Thanks to his courage he manages to avoid being shot, and finally escapes from it to the front line—back to his own.

During a brief leave to his small homeland, he learns that his beloved wife Irina and both daughters died in a bombing. Of his relatives, only his young officer son remains. When he returns to the front, Andrei receives word that his son was killed on the last day of the war.

After the war, the lonely Sokolov works in other people’s places. There he meets a little boy Vanya, an orphan. His mother has died, and his father is missing. Sokolov tells the boy that he is his father—thereby giving the boy (and himself) hope for a new life.

Two orphaned people, two grains of sand blown into alien lands by a military hurricane of unimaginable force… What lies ahead for them? And one would like to think that this Russian man, a person of unbending will, will endure, and—standing close to the fatherly shoulder—will raise the one who, growing up, will be able to endure everything, overcome everything on his path, if the Motherland calls him to do so.

The plot of the story is based on real events. In the spring of 1946, while hunting, Sholokhov met a man who told him his sad story. Sholokhov was gripped by it, and he decided: “I will write a story about this. I must, absolutely must write it.” Ten years later, rereading the stories of Hemingway, Remarque, and other foreign writers, Sholokhov wrote the story “The Fate of a Man” in seven days.