Shraer [Shrayer] , Maksim D. Antisemitizm i upadok russkoi derevenskoi prozy. Astaf'ev, Belov, Rasputin (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 346 exhibited themes of militarization in books of the 1930s and ’40s. In the 1950s and ’60s, after the death of Stalin, when there was a return to the ideals of Lenin, themes such as moral choices and allegiance to the Party were recurring in the books. Soviet translations of British books strengthened ideas of any-religious themes, class struggle, war and the fight for independence, as these were ideas that were also very important for Soviet identity. In this unique book, the author makes the original argument that Russian translations cast a Soviet ideological shadow over English stories by emphasizing inequality, the hardship of the English working class and its movement, as standing in opposition to its imperialist past. Sewanee the University of the South Susanna Weygandt Shraer [Shrayer], Maksim D. Antisemitizm i upadok russkoi derevenskoi prozy. Astaf´ev, Belov, Rasputin. Contemporary Western Rusistika. Academic Studies Press and BiblioRossiia, Boston, MA and St Petersburg, 2020. 112 pp. Notes. Bibliography. $30.00. Village prose was the most significant literary movement in the Soviet Union during the early 1960s to mid-1970s, characterized by a nostalgic memory of a rural childhood, and of a world as yet untouched by modernity and even ideology. Its main practitioners — Astaf´ev, Belov and Rasputin who are the subjects of this monograph, but also Vasilii Shukshin, Fedor Abramov, and Boris Mozhaev — are all united in being born in the 1920s and 1930s, and spending their early years in a rural community before moving on to adult life in a local urban centre (in Shukshin’s case several). Collectively their writings form a corpus that recreates an idyll of rural life before industrialization, is reminiscentofnineteenth-centurybucoliccanvasesasevokedbyIvanTurgenev and Gleb Uspenskii, and rejects urban ways as alien to the ‘real’ Russia of the village. Village prose began to decline from the mid-1970s with the death of Shukshin (in 1974) and Abramov (in 1983), and the surviving above-mentioned authors turning away from the pastoral and towards a diatribe against what destroyed it. Maxim Shrayer’s formulaic solution is straightforward and simplistic: Astaf´ev, Rasputin and Belov hated Jews in Russian society. His evidence based on their fictional writings is scanty, and only with reference to Vasilii Belov is there sufficient meat to cover the bare bones. The book is structured around three major chapters, one for each writer, framed by a perfunctory introduction and a final chapter ‘instead of a conclusion’. Belov and Astaf´ev are afforded almost forty pages each, while Valentin Rasputin, ‘the environmental anti- REVIEWS 347 Semite’, seems added on as an afterthought with a mere thirteen, and even then the author admits in his summing up that ‘anti-Semitism mainly manifested itself in the writer’s non-fiction (v publisistike) and not in his fiction’ (p. 88). More could have been said of Rasputin’s xenophobia, as expressed in his prose fiction published in the last years of his life, especially his vitriolic attacks on the peoples of the Caucasus, but of this there is nothing. This is a shame, as Rasputin’s negative attitude to non-Russians and his nationalistic flag-waving are indeed reasons for his fall from grace among Russian intellectuals. Therein lies the rub. The chapter on the writings of Viktor Astaf´ev (‘the internal anti-Semite’) essentially discusses just one work of fiction, the novel Tsar´-ryba (first published in 1976, not 1977, as here), although there is admittedly some insightful exploration of its Biblical motifs. Otherwise the chapter focuses on Astaf´ev’s well-documented correspondence with Natan Eidel´man, and less so with Iurii Nagibin, Of Astaf´ev’s ‘war prose’, for which he has been duly recognized in the post-Soviet period, the author merely comments that ‘there are no Jewish bones and Jewish corpses in what Astaf’ev relates about the war’ (p. 40). It is unclear to this reviewer how this statement, however true it may be, is of relevance to a study of village prose, and indeed any rationale for its ‘decline’. The main problem with this study is that it does not engage with its own stated purpose, and only scratches the surface of its subject...