Quiet Flows the Don (1957)

A screen adaptation of the novel of the same name by Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov, a Nobel Prize winner. The film depicts the destinies of the Don Cossacks during the First World War and the Civil War in Russia. Cossack Grigory Melekhov lives in a village of Veshenskaya. He is in love with Aksynia, but on his father's insistence, has to marry another girl. Finding out about his love affair with Aksynia, his young wife leaves home. Shortly before the war, Grigory and his beloved also leave the farm. While on the Austrian front, Grigory learns of the Czar's abdication and of the end of the war. He is on his way home where Aksynia must be waiting for him.