A Paradise Lost? Siberia and Its Writers, 1960 to 1990

Abstract

With the benefit of hindsight, and looking in from the outside on a Soviet Union that is in the 1990s disintegrating into various ethnic groupings, we can assert with reasonable confidence that the most important feature of Soviet literature in the post-Stalin period has been its drift from the center, from Moscow, and its inclination toward regionalism. Many writers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially those who were to form the “village prose” tendency, wrote about the places associated with their own rural childhood and youth. Moreover, this shift of focus was not just a geographical one. In her seminal work The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, Katerina Clark observes that many writers in these years “began to recommend a journey ‘far away from Moscow’ not in place but in time,” and that they “wanted a revival of the earlier time represented by rural Russia… a garden world… of wholeness and tranquility.”¹ In short, the village writers looked to the unspoiled places of their own rural childhood as a counterpoint to the increasingly depersonalized urban present. Not only did they make a pastoral of their own experience, but the places associated with it became idyllic, Eden-like. Furthermore, to many writers the myth of the past is also a time of stability and order, and strong central government, a clear contrast to the dissoluteness they see as characteristic of the present. So Vasilii Belov writes mainly about the village communities around Vologda oblast’ to the northwest of Moscow, Fedor Abramov’s works are largely set in the villages of Arkhangel’sk oblast’ in the far north of European Russia, Evgenii Nosov sets his stories in and around Kursk oblast’, and Vladimir Soloukhin’s early works are set in the countryside of Vladimir district.