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Part of the book: Valentin Rasputin and Soviet Russian Village Prose

David C. Gillespie

MHRA Texts and Dissertations 22

Modern Humanities Research Association

ContemporaryRussianFictionopen

Abstract.  Rasputin's mature period begins in earnest with the publication of Posledniy srok. It is the work he considers to be his most successful, a judgement no doubt coloured by the fact that Anna, the eighty-year-old peasant woman who is the story's central character, is modelled on his own grandmother, Mariya Gerasimovna Rasputina. The work also marks the blossoming of the author's talent for psychological exploration and character interplay. In Vniz i vverkh po techeniyu, Viktor visits his village for the first time in five years. The old site had been flooded to form a reservoir for the Bratsk hydro-electric station, and the village moved. The destruction of man's roots goes hand in hand with the destruction of the natural world as, grotesquely, trees that used to be on dry land now protrude out of the water. Rasputin's major novel Proshchaniyes Matyoroy, concerned with industrialization and the Communist ideological precept of 'electrification of the country', is examined in the context of Leonov's similarly-themed Five Year Plan novel, Sor'.

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