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NY Times, Mar. 19 2015
Valentin Rasputin, Russian Writer Who Led ‘Village Prose’ Movement, Dies
at 77
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
MOSCOW — Valentin Rasputin, a patriarch of the so-called village prose
writers who emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1960s to address moral
and environmental issues and depict the remains of a rural Russia about
to be consumed by industrialization, died here on Saturday. He was 77.
He died in a hospital one day short of his birthday after falling into a
coma, the Russian Union of Writers said.
In a reflection of Mr. Rasputin’s stature, Patriarch Kirill I of the
Russian Orthodox Church led his funeral service at Christ the Savior
Cathedral in Moscow on Wednesday, and President Vladimir V. Putin paid
his respects on Tuesday.
The inward-looking worldview that shaped Mr. Rasputin’s writings and
public statements has in recent years been mirrored by the positions of
Mr. Putin and the patriarch. Mr. Rasputin, who was baptized into the
Russian Orthodox Church in 1980, had advocated the prosecution of
members of Pussy Riot, the feminist collective that was tried for
performing a “punk prayer” at the cathedral in 2012. In 2014, he signed
a letter by writers in support of Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea.
“It seems there are no grounds to believe, but I believe that the West
will not get its hands on Russia,” Mr. Rasputin said in a series of
conversations that first appeared in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya
and were published in 2007 as a book called “Valentin Rasputin: Pain of
the Soul.” “It’s not possible to drive all patriots to the grave, and
there are more and more of them. And if they were driven to the grave,
the coffins would rise upright and move to defend their lands.” He also
defended Joseph Stalin.
In a flurry of commentary after his death, conservatives praised Mr.
Rasputin as a keeper of the Russian soul, and liberals, even while
praising his writing, expressed concern about his nationalist, Stalinist
and anti-Semitic views. For example, he told The New York Times
Magazine, in an interview published in 1990, that Jews bore
responsibility for the terror that followed the Bolshevik Revolution and
that “their guilt is great.”
Mr. Rasputin’s books sold millions of copies under communism, and toward
the end of the Soviet era he received major state awards. But he and the
other village prose writers, with their alternately romantic and brutal
portraits of peasant life, were seen by some members of the Communist
establishment as deviating from the socialist realism that the state
usually demanded of artists and writers.
Valentin Grigoriyevich Rasputin was born on March 15, 1937, in the
village of Ust-Uda in what is now the Irkutsk region. His parents,
Grigory and Nina, were peasants. After completing primary school in the
village of Atalanka, he had to travel, alone, to another town to
continue his education in the hungry postwar years — an experience he
portrayed in the story “French Lessons,” published in 1973.
His writing first attracted attention when he was a student at Irkutsk
State University and wrote for a youth newspaper during the thaw begun
by the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev after Stalin’s death, when the
bounds on expression were relaxed. He continued to work as a journalist
after graduating in 1959.
But Khrushchev’s agricultural and industrial policies were also a death
knell for traditional village life. The fate of Mr. Rasputin’s childhood
villages became fodder for one of his most famous works, the 1976 novel
“Farewell to Matyora.” The novel is about an island village on the
Angara River that is about to be subsumed in the 1960s by construction
of the Bratsk hydroelectric plant, and the elderly residents who try to
resist resettlement and cannot adapt to city life.
After a vivid description of the beginning of spring in the opening
chapter, Mr. Rasputin — an ardent environmentalist who fought to protect
Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake — continues,
“Everything was in place, but everything was wrong.”
Mr. Rasputin had difficulty working for years after being beaten by
street thugs in Irkutsk in 1980. He returned with “The Fire” (1985), and
then focused increasingly on essays that reflected his fears about the
state of Russia under Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms and, later, in the
post-Soviet era.
He served in the Congress of People’s Deputies, a legislative body
created by Mr. Gorbachev, from 1989 to 1990, and was appointed to the
presidential council in 1990. But Mr. Rasputin quickly lashed out
against Mr. Gorbachev and co-signed letters with nationalist cultural
figures, academics and politicians that provided an ideological basis
for the 1991 coup against him.
Mr. Rasputin is survived by a son, Sergei, and a granddaughter. His
wife, Svetlana, died in 2012, and his daughter, Maria, died in a plane
crash in 2006.
Kathleen Parthé, the director of Russian studies at the University of
Rochester and the author of two books that address village prose, said
of Mr. Rasputin in an email, “Like many of Russia’s best-known writers,
he was always slightly out of step with the times — too bold in the
1960s and 1970s with his nostalgia for the radiant village past, too
critical of the Soviet destruction of the environment around his beloved
Lake Baikal, too disdainful of Western-style democracy, too bitter about
those he said had brought a millennium-old civilization to an end in 1917.”
She added, “As a writer he may have been a spent force, but as a
cultural icon who helped legitimize the latest version of Russian
authoritarianism,” he was receiving “a very grand send-off.”
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