The city and the village represent two poles of Soviet society and ideology. The city symbolizes the future; the industrial proletariat is the natural ally of the Party. But the village provides a constant reminder of Russia's past, folklore and spirituality. It is this second theme which Valentin Rasputin, born in a Siberian village in 1937, takes up. Though not prolific he became a widely-read novelist, converting to Christianity in 1980 and ultimately moving to the political right after Glasnost. His novel Farewell to Matyora (1976) is considered a canonical example of 'village prose', an idealised picture of hard but pure farming life among the peasantry shortly to be displaced by the building of a hydroelectric dam.
This book, originally published in paperback in 1986 under the ISBN 978-0-947623-08-1, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
Valentin Rasputin is regarded both in the Soviet Union and abroad as a writer with a keen interest in the social and psychological drama of crisis and change. He is one of the foremost literary figures in the Soviet Union, and, still relatively young, offers much for the future. This is especially so given his recent return to literary production following a prolonged silence and serious injury. Indeed, the time would seem right for an appraisal of his literary career to date, the four major povesti and handful of short stories on which his almost universal acclaim is based. As a writer with many thematic links and affinities with the 'village prose' movement in modern Soviet Russian literature, Rasputin must be viewed not in isolation, but as a representative, and perhaps even the best, of the social and cultural conscience of his generation.
Rasputin's early short stories. His first journalistic books, Kostrovyye novykh gorodov ('Lights for Building New Cities') is a collection of essays in praise of construction work for the Abakan-Tayshet railway line, and Kray vozle samogo neba ('The Land at the Top of the World'), which describes the lifestyle of the isolated Tofalariyan people, whose lives are conditioned by the mountains and the taiga where they hunt. Finally, Rasputin's first full-length povest', and his first work to show real artistic power: Den'gi dlya Marii, a story about a village shop in Siberia, where Mariya, the reluctant shopkeeper, must deal with a discrepancy in accounts discovered by a government inspector.
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'.
Zhivi i pomni is Rasputin's only major work not set in the contemporary period. In the last months of the Second World War, Nastyona's husband Andrey deserts from the army and returns surreptitiously to his native village, and together they resume some semblance of their pre-war relationship. Within the broad canvas of war, Rasputin thus concentrates on a tiny, seemingly inconsequential pocket of human drama, but creates in it a situation of profound and universal significance.
Like Pasternak's Doktor Zhivago, Rasputin' works show Russia in transition, where revolution is accompanied by catastrophe. Death corresponds to winter, and water – the flow of time and history – causes change and disruption. Rasputin's heroines, like Lara, are Mother Russia personified. Rasputin's portrayal of women, moreover, is a hymn of praise to that section of the population who have suffered most in Soviet history. He is concerned not with external sexual relationships, as are the Soviet 'urban' writers, but with the inner world of woman. Women embody love, warmth, stability, and fortitude in an uncertain age.
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Bibliography entry:
Gillespie, David C., Valentin Rasputin and Soviet Russian Village Prose, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 22 (MHRA, 1986)
First footnote reference:35 David C. Gillespie, Valentin Rasputin and Soviet Russian Village Prose, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 22 (MHRA, 1986), p. 21.
Subsequent footnote reference:37 Gillespie, p. 47.
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