Quote by Mikhail Sholokhov: “A man is made for happiness like a bird is made for flying.”

Happiness is not a luxury or a reward — it is the natural condition of a human being, just as flight is the natural condition of a bird. When people are unhappy, something unnatural is being done to them or to their circumstances. This is a quietly radical assertion of the human right to flourish.

Sholokhov published The Fate of a Man in Pravda on January 1, 1957. The story was the first major Soviet literary work to address the experience of Soviet prisoners of war, who had been systematically stigmatized as traitors by the Stalinist state. Its publication during the Khrushchev thaw marked a cautious reopening of honest discussion about the human cost of the war.

Russian novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965, best known for his four-volume epic And Quiet Flows the Don, which depicts the Cossack people of the Don River region through the First World War, the Revolution, and the Civil War. His short story The Fate of a Man, published in 1957, became one of the most celebrated accounts of a Soviet soldier's survival in the Second World War.