Siberia as Volia: Vasilii Shukshin’s Search for Freedom

Abstract

Although Soviet filmmaker and writer Vasilii Makarovich Shukshin (1929–1974) was born in the Altai region of western Siberia and set most of his stories and shot three of his films there, he is generally not known as a Siberian writer. Like fellow Siberian authors Viktor Astaf’ev and Valentin Rasputin, Shukshin is often (though largely erroneously) associated with the “village prose” movement in Soviet literature, which sought to depict life in the Soviet countryside as a last repository of traditional values and culture. Unlike the works of Astaf’ev and Rasputin, however, Shukshin’s seems to be more occupied with the “landscape of the human soul” than the landscape of Siberia.2 However, as the investigation that follows will show, three myths of Siberia can be readily identified in Shukshin’s works, myths that inform in an essential way both Shukshin’s writing and his biography. They include Siberia as a place of childhood innocence; Siberia as a pastoral, uncorrupted landscape, set in opposition to the city; and Siberia as a place of unrestricted space and complete individual freedom.