Abstract
One of the thorniest critical debates about the legacy of Russian village prose at the end of the 1980s had to do with the relationship between rural literature and the rise of extreme Russian nationalist groups, especially Pamyat. Such actions as the public expression by several erstwhile derevenshchiki of affinity with some of Pamyat’s ideas, the way some of these same writers wielded power in the RSFSR Writers’ Union, and the signing — along with many urban writers — of collective letters of a generally xenophobic and specifically anti-Semitic character have led to a linking both in the USSR and the West of village prose with chauvinism. Among the contemporary rereadings of post-revolutionary works and movements is the rereading of derevenskaia proza as a‘seedbed’ for chauvinism. To a certain extent, this view has replaced previous assessments of the same literature as being primarily nationalistic or just nostalgic. My chapter will attempt to untangle this complex situation first by defining this literary movement, and then by distinguishing the legacy of canonical village prose from the activities of people who at one time wrote this type of literature, and from literary critics and ideologues who have adapted metaphors from village prose for their own uses.
‘See what your nihilists are doing!
They’re setting Petersburg on fire!’
(An acquaintance of Turgenev1)
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is…
(Wallace Stevens)
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Notes
This was said to Turgenev by an acquaintance who met him on Nevsky Prospect shortly after the publication of Fathers and Sons in the spring of 1862, when the city was plagued by a rash of fires attributed to revolutionaries; quoted by Avrahm Yarmolinsky in Turgenev. The man, his art and his age (New York, 1959), p. 204. The Wallace Stevens quotation is from ‘A Postcard from the Volcano’.
Several critics have proposed non-thematic approaches to village prose. See Galina Belaia, ‘Pol’za intuitsii. Proza 70-kh godov v zhurnal’nykh stat’iakh 1980 goda. Opyt problemnogo obzora’, Literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 6, 1981, pp. 9–14; and, by the same author, ‘O “vnutrennei” i“vneshnei” terne’, in her book Literatura v zerkale kritiki. Sovremennye problemy (Moscow, 1986), pp. 158, 170–1. See also: Liliia Vil’chek, ‘Derevenskaia proza’, in Sovremennaia russkaia sovetskaia proza, Part II, ed. A. G. Bocharov and G. A. Belaia (Moscow, 1987), pp. 52–3; and by the same author, Vniz po techeniiu derevenskoi prozy’, Voprosy literatury, 1985, no. 6, pp. 35, 72. Georg Witte warned against seeing the evolution from kolkhoz to village prose as merely a change of themes: see Die sowjetische Kolkhos- und Dorfprosa der fünfziger und sechziger Jahre. Zur Evolution einer literarischen Unterreihe (Munich, 1983), p. 1. It has also been said that writers like Rasputin, Abramov and Belov created not merely a style but a‘mode of thought’: Peter Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis, Sovremennaia russkaia proza (Ann Arbor, 1982), p. 93.
A. Petrik,’ “Derevenskaia proza”: Itogi i perspektivy izucheniia’, Filologicheskie nauki, 1981, no. 1, p. 66.
Philippa Lewis, ‘Peasant nostalgia in contemporary Russian literature’, Soviet Studies, Vol. XXVII, no. 4 (Oct. 1976), p. 552.
Geoffrey Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism. Soviet fiction since Ivan Denisovich’ (New York, 1980), p. 82.
Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday. A sociology of nostalgia (New York, 1979), pp. 8–10. Further references are indicated in the text.
Geoffrey Hosking, ‘The Russian peasant discovered: village prose of the 1960’s’, Slavic Review, Vol. 32, no. 4 (Dec. 1973), p. 724, footnote 26.
Richard Coe, When the Grass was Taller. Autobiography and the experience of childhood (New Haven, Connecticut, 1984), p. 64.
Brodsky described village prose as ‘largely unpalatable [with a] strong tendency toward nationalistic self-appreciation’; see Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One. Selected essays (New York, 1986) pp. 294–5.
Vladimir Tendriakov, ‘Den’ na rodine’, Nauka i religiia, 1964, no. 11, p. 44.
Rosalind Krauss, ‘Poststructuralism and the paraliterary’, The Originality of the Avant-garde and other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Massa-chusetts, 1985), pp. 292–3; as quoted in Catherine R. Stimpson, ‘Woolf’s room, our project’, in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York, 1989), p. 131.
The samizdat material is discussed in ‘The debate over the national renaissance in Russia’, Section VI of The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’ — an anthology, ed. Mikhail Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin, trans. Nickolas Lupinin (Belmont, Massa-chusetts, 1977), pp. 345–448; of special interest are Mikhail Agurskii’s discussion of ‘The intensification of neo-Nazi dangers in the Soviet Union’ (pp. 414–19), and the two appendices that follow (pp. 420–48). David Shipler (Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times 1977–9) discusses some of these contributors to samizdat in the 1970s in Russia. Broken idols, solemn dreams (New York, 1984), pp. 323–46. Igor’ Shafarevich’s essay ‘Russofobia’ appeared in two instalments in the June and November 1989 issues of Nash sovremennik. The collective letter ‘Pis’ma pisatelei Rossii. V Tsentral’nyi komitet KPSS’ was published in the 2 March 1990 issue of Literaturnaia Rossiia. Although the original letter was signed by 74 people, several hundred more (among them Belov on 23 March 1990) subsequently wrote to Literaturnaia Rossiia, express-ing their full support for the document and their desire to be considered as signatories.
Vladimir Lakshin, ‘Po pravdu govoria: Romany o kotorykh sporiat’, Izvestiia, 3 and 4 December 1986. Excerpts from this article were translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. XXXVIII, no. 51 (21 January 1987), pp. 7–9, 14.
Vasilii Aksenov, ‘Ne vpolne sentimental’noe puteshestvie’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 16 March 1990, pp. 10–11; trans. by Moira Ratchford and Josephine Woll in The New Republic, 16 April 1990, p. 215. Aksenov sees these writers, under Belov’s leadership, as worse than the leaders of Pamyat. His condemnation of the derevenshchiki for being members of the Party is somewhat strange, considering that Aksenov and a number of other urban writers came from solid Party families, who suffered during the purges (though not because they had lost faith in communism).
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© 1992 International Council for Soviet and East European Studies, and Sheelagh Duffin Graham
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Parthé, K. (1992). Village Prose: Chauvinism, Nationalism or Nostalgia?. In: Graham, S.D. (eds) New Directions in Soviet Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22331-2_7
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