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Russian Village Prose
The Radiant Past
Kathleen F. Parthé
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Russian Village Prose
The Radiant Past
Kathleen F. Parthé
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About This Book
Kathleen Parth offers the first comprehensive examination of the controversial literary movement Russian Village Prose. From the 1950s to the decline of the movement in the 1970s, Valentin Rasputin, Fedor Abramov, and other writers drew on "luminous" memories of their rural childhoods to evoke a thousand-year-old pattern of life that was disappearing as they wrote. In their lyrical descriptions of a vanishing world, they expressed nostalgia for Russia's past and fears for the nation's future; they opposed collectivized agriculture, and fought to preserve traditional art and architecture and to protect the environment. Assessing the place of Village Prose in the newly revised canon of twentieth-century Russian literature, Parth maintains that these writers consciously ignored and undermined Socialist Realism, and created the most aesthetically coherent and ideologically important body of published writings to appear in the Soviet Union between Stalin's death and Gorbachev's ascendancy. In the 1970s, Village Prose was seen as moderately nationalist and conservative in spirit. After 1985, however, statements by several of its practitioners caused the movement to be reread as a possible stimulus for chauvinistic, anti-Semitic groups like Pamyat. This important development is treated here with a thorough discussion of all the political implications of these rural narratives. Nevertheless, the center of Parth's work remains her exploration of the parameters that constitute a "code of reading" for works of Village Prose. The appendixes contain a translation and analysis of a particularly fine example of Russian Village Prose--Aleksei Leonov's "Kondyr."
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Critique littéraire russeONE
THE PARAMETERS OF VILLAGE PROSE
All villages tell stories.
(John Berger)
(John Berger)
Oh my quiet homeland,
I have forgotten nothing.
(Nikolai Rubtsov)1
I have forgotten nothing.
(Nikolai Rubtsov)1
VILLAGE PROSE (derevenskaia proza) has most often been defined as literature with a rural theme, setting, and characters that evolved out of the “Ovechkin-style” essay sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s.2 Included in this definition is the notion that this is an “inside” view of rural life, since the majority of Village Prose writers (derevenshchiki) grew up in villages, in contrast to the authors of kolkhoz (collective-farm) novels, who were frequently urban in origin and outlook.3 The basic characterization of Village Prose could be expanded from one theme (tema) to a collective thematics (tematika) that encompassed the rural/urban split, criticism of government policy in the countryside, the revival of Russian national and religious sentiment, a search for national values, a concern for the environment, and a nostalgia generated by the loss of traditional rural life that was elevated to what Geoffrey Hosking has called “an elegiac intensity.”4 Within the context of this expanded thematics, the traditional village and its peasants acquired symbolic resonance, and their decline could be read as having “radical implications” for the Russian people.5
Theme-based definitions of Village Prose are not in themselves wrong, but they are insufficient; they simply do not capture enough of the most important qualities of this material, and they give little indication of the crucial ways in which it was a force for aesthetic as well as ideological renewalin Russian literature. Galina Belaia has repeatedly complained that superficial themes like “village” and “urban” are not very useful in the analysis of concrete works of art; she asks for a newer, deeper “critical code.”6 Along these lines, there is another way of looking at Village Prose—as not just a theme or set of themes, but as a thematic orientation that has its own ideological, moral, and aesthetic profile.7 Liliia Vilchek points us toward an even more comprehensive description when she speaks of the “contours” (kontury) and “system of coordinates” (sistema koordinat) of this literary movement, and, most importantly, of its “code of reading” (kod prochteniia)—its semiotic.8
In The Soviet Novel Katerina Clark provided what amounts to a code of reading for that genre, by carefully reconstructing its “prototypical plot” and definitive characteristics, along with the most important rituals and patterns. While referring extensively to specific works, she gives the reader the clearest possible sense of the invariants, the essence, of the Socialist Realist novel.9
This is what I will try to do for Village Prose: construct useful generalizations without violating specific works, or reducing a richly varied literary movement to a single scheme. So much literature on the rural theme has been written since Stalin’s death that it can seem at times to be an undifferentiated mass, but, as with the Socialist Realist novel, a canonical work can be identified, and such an identification has an important critical and historical function.
Basically, I envision a spectrum of Soviet Russian literature on rural themes, with the Socialist Realist kolkhoz novel at one end, and Russian Village Prose at the other. Literary works about the countryside written after 1953 fit in along the spectrum according to a finite set of constituent properties culled from the reading of a large number of works from this period, and reinforced by an examination of the relevant critical literature. These properties—or parameters—are not meant to exercise a theoretical stranglehold, but to quantify, that is, to make more explicit, the sense among Soviet writers, critics, and readers that a major change took place in Russian rural prose in the 1950s, something with more than simply the politically reformist dimension that we have traditionally used to identify literature of the Thaw.
Not all the parameters carry equal weight in this description: some are core attributes, while others are peripheral. In a given work, of course, there can be a great deal of overlapping—between properties of Village Prose and of War Prose, for example, or even between Village and Urban Prose. As the concept of a spectrum makes clear, a work can exhibit some characteristics of both Village Prose and Socialist Realist Kolkhoz Literature, although one or the other type of literature will generally predominate. The core properties of Village Prose make a contrast at almost every point to those of Kolkhoz Literature, and indeed, contrast is used in both of these types of rural literature as a structural principle: such contrasts as old/new, endings/beginnings, oldage/youth, submittingto nature/rulingnature, preservation/destructionl, ocal/nationals, piritual/materialc, ontinuity/revolution, past/present, and hand/machine.Aswescanthespectrum from Kolkhoz Literature to Village Prose, the positive and negative poles of these contrasting elements are reversed.10
The parameters of Village Prose will be sketched out in this introductory chapter, and a number of the core properties—language, cyclical time, childhood memories, loss, the use of the past—will be further elaborated in the chapters that follow. Together they comprise a “code of reading” for Village Prose, which is its most comprehensive description and a necessary heuristic device. To paraphrase Gary Saul Morson, classification is in a large measure interpretation.11 My translation of Aleksei Leonov’s story “Kondyr” and its companion essay show how the code of reading that has evolved in this book can be applied back to specific texts.
The Village
It is axiomatic that “Village Prose”12—which is mostly set in the years after the collectivization of agriculture began in the late 1920s—is centered in the village rather than the kolkhoz, even though these may actually occupy the same physical space (kolkhozes generally include a number of villages). The name of the village—Shibanikha in Belov’s The Eve, Pekashino in Abramov’s The Pryaslins, Matyora in Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora—is more prominent than the name of the kolkhoz, which is used ironically, if at all (kolkhozes were given names like “Victory,” “The Path to Socialism,” or “Lenin”). The village name gives the residents a distinct identity, a means of differentiating themselves verbally from the residents of the next village, as, for example, pekashintsy ‘people-from-Pekashino’, in a way that the kolkhoz name does not.
The village boundary has traditionally had both a magic and a social power. In Russian folklore, crossing boundaries—of the thres hold or the village—made one vulnerable to evil spirits who could harm or even kill you. In a social sense, the people in the adjoining settlements may have had everything in common with each other, but they had different names and often perceived each other as being not only different, but even hostile (chuzhoi).
In an interior monologue from Vladimir Lichutin’s The Last Wizard, an old woman thinks about her son who lives in another village:
Just think: Kuchema is really close—just fifteen miles down the river—but it isn’t at all like here, it’s strange. The people there have different blood and different customs. They don’t sow barley, and because they haven’t worked the land for so long, they’re wild and sharp-tongued. In the old days, Pogorelsky women thought of Kuchema as a different country. Look at my son: he hasn’t even lived there fifteen years and already he’s changed completely and has taken up all their ways.13
To this cast of mind, each village is a separate homeland, a malaia rodina. “Every village has its own beliefs—every settlement its own customs.”14
Moshe Lewin notes that periodic brawls—often planned ahead of time—took place during major religious holidays, usually between the men of neighboring villages. “Atavistic mechanisms, dimly preserved reminiscences of old, protracted, long-solved, and seemingly forgotten land feuds between villages might have kept unextinguished residues of hatred and a desire for vengeance which was ready to flare up on some occasion or other against real or apparent culprits of an almost mythical past.”15
Allowing for regional variation, the village had a fairly stable set of features: simple houses (wooden in the north and Siberia, wattle-anddaub or stucco in the central and southern regions), and their outbuildings (barns, sheds), vegetable gardens, small orchards, ponds, bathhouses, wells, a church and bell tower (though not in every village), and a cemetery.16
Village Prose emphasizes that the village is isolated from the rest of the world. It is linked to the outside by a country road (proselok), a turning off from the nearest highroad (bol'shak).177 The isolation served to reinforce differences not only between neighboring rural settlements, but also between rural and urban areas.
Each village constructs “a living portrait of itself . . . everybody is portrayed and everybody portrays.”18 This is an oral history, built out of the stories of the day and narratives handed down from one generation to another; it is the way that the village defines itself. This ongoing “communal” portrait is not simply gossip: “it is an organic part of the life of the village. Should it cease, the village would disintegrate. ”19
In a discussion of how the Revolution of 1789 was received in rural France, Emmet Kennedy stressed the importance of the village. In Paris, the leading men of letters had initiated a rejection of institutional constraints. “By contrast, authority was the village, not something erected over and against it, which helps explain the villages’ perpetuation of traditions. The village was the matrix of cultural reproduction and stability. ” It was ruled by deference, reverence, belief, and habit, “the antithesis of the mocking spirit of Paris. ”20 The Russian village had the same enduring stability. Moshe Lewin calls the village “the living cell—of rural society in Russia” about which little has been written. He cautions that “unless we ‘crack,’ so to speak, the village, something very crucial for the understanding of rural society will be missing. Probably also for the understanding of Russia. It is inside the village that forces were at work—neighborhood networks, family systems, labor processes, social hierarchies and values—that maintained this huge mass of rural humanity and sustained, shaped, sometimes blocked Russia.”21 The peasant commune eventually fell to collectivization, Lewin notes, but the village and the peasantry remained. And their story is told in Village Prose.
Nature
Nature also occupies an important place in Village Prose, though rarely to the exclusion of human beings. Georges Nivat sees a myth—even a cult—of the Russian landscape among writers and artists from the early nineteenth century on, which reemerges in Village Prose; “half-pagan, half-Christian, it measures the immeasurable, the riches/ poverty of the landscape. ”22 Tsvetov calls the attitude of the derevenshchiki toward nature not that of “feigned rapture” at the beauty of the landscape, but a sense of “kinship.”23 In Village Prose, we see mostly the nature that is part of the villagers’ everyday activities—the kitchen garden (ogorod), the orchard, ponds and fields, the forest and the river. When the peasant ventures out of the village, it is usually to fish in the river or to gather mushrooms, berries, or firewood in the forest, or—more rarely—to go hunting. The forest is life-sustaining, but also awe-inspiring, and well into the Soviet period it gave rise to a variety of superstitions among rural people, as Vasilii Belov demonstrated in Harmony and Iurii Kazakov in “Goblins.” The mysterious power of nature still pervaded descriptions of the forest, thunderstorms, and the breakup of river ice in the spring (ledokhod). The naturalcycles controlled virtually every aspect of the villagers’ lives—when they worked, when they rested, when they celebrated.
There is a purer type of nature writing in Soviet Russian literature—as there is a purer form of hunters’ narratives—in works by Kazakov, Nagibin, and Astafiev, where the emphasis is on nature to the exclusion of all but one or two observers, usually hunters or fishermen. ...