Abstract
In one of his interviews, Rasputin wrote, "Matera, my village, has been flooded over. Nowadays, some of its people live in the city and some in a workers' settlement, and I must follow them and see what they have lost and what they have gained." He expressed this need of his as a writer on more than one occasion, both immediately after the publication of Farewell to Matera [Proshchanie s Materoi] and later on. And finally, nearly ten years after Matera was written, a new work appeared, the novella The Fire [Pozhar] (Our Contemporary [Nash sovremennik], 1985, 7). In it, Rasputin fulfills the promise he made long ago. He takes the reader to a settlement of the very type where the residents of Matera and other similar villages were transported after they were flooded out. The author needed the resulting temporal distance; in the intervening period, a new way of life had finally been manifested and the shifts that he was investigating in the relationships among people and their characters and values had taken place.
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