TEXT 7. Translators' Introduction: Valentin Rasputin Since The Fire

With the possible exception of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970, Valentin Rasputin was the most gifted and influential Russian prose writer of the last thirty years of the Soviet era. During the two decades of his maturity and growing prominence in the pre-Gorbachev literary world (1965-85), Rasputin created at least a dozen masterpieces of shorter fiction (malaia proza) that have become what are known in Russian as "contemporary classics." The list includes five novellas (povesti) – Money for Maria (Den'gi dlia Marii, 1966), Borrowed Time (Poslednii srok, 1970), Live and Remember (Zhivi i pomni, 1974), Farewell to Matyora (Proshchanie s Materoi, 1976), and The Fire (Pozhar, 1985) – and several short stories that are deeply moving even when read repeatedly and that will provide pleasure and benefit for many years to come.

The distinguishing features of Rasputin's prose tales are the broad sweep of the tragic human events they depict, the penetrating psycho­logical and social realism of his character portrayals, the vividness and rugged beauty of his nature descriptions, the profundity and provocativeness of the author's philosophical digressions, the persistence and integrity of his creative consciousness at work, and, above all, the inge­nuity of his language. His lexicon and phraseology are deeply rooted in the fertile soil of Russian folk idiom. His protagonists speak a lively and colorful Siberian peasant Russian. His narration has an unhurried and majestic flow, reminiscent of his native Angara River. In reading any of Rasputin's novellas or short stories the reader gets an almost visceral satisfaction from every level of structure: isolated verb choice, sentence syntax, paragraph organization, chapter completeness, and the architectonics of the work as a whole. Rasputin is a master storyteller. There are no loose ends in his works. Moreover, his five novellas and best short stories, taken together, form an epic of Siberian village life in the twentieth century that spans several generations and chronicles the effects of two world wars, of revolution and civil chaos, of Stalinist ter­ror and collectivization – and, more recently, of forced conversion from an agricultural to a logging and industrial economy, including con­struction of massive hydroelectric power plants and the flooding of once-populated river banks, in transforming a thriving rural culture almost beyond recognition.

Rasputin's exalted place in the history of Russian literature is, therefore, secure. He would be considered an outstanding writer had he created nothing other than Live and Remember and Farewell to Matyora. In view of his collected oeuvres, Rasputin ranks at least as high as his nineteenth-century forebears Ivan Goncharov and Nikolay Leskov; he is one of the few living Russian writers who could conceivably be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

Since the mid-1970s Rasputin has chosen a more direct means than belles lettres to speak out on issues of general human concern. Writing in the genres of the essay (ocherk), the prepared interview (interv'iu), the book preface (predislovie), and the anniversary com­memoration, he has addressed a wide variety of topics while concen­trating on the following: contemporary Russian literature, especially "village prose" (derevenskaia proza); the craft and obligations of the writer in society; the history of Russians in Siberia and their relation­ships with the indigenous Siberian tribes and with the central Russian (and Soviet) authorities in Saint Petersburg and Moscow; the dangers of destroying Lake Baikal and other precious natural resources and his­torical landmarks; and the restoration of Russian national conscious­ness, pride, and patriotism in an era when Russians are often blamed for the horrors of the calamitous Soviet experiment.

(Winchell M., Mikkelson J. Translator's introduction // Sibiria, Sibiria / Valentin Rasputin. Nothwestern University Press, Evanstone, Illinois, 1997. P. 1–2)