The Russian Peasant Rediscovered: “Village Prose” of the 1960s

Abstract

The name of Solzhenitsyn so dominated the Soviet literary scene in the 1960s that the ordinary Western reader might be forgiven for supposing that in the writing of fiction he was the lone star in an otherwise featureless sky. This is far from being the case. Solzhenitsyn himself, in a recent interview with Western correspondents, pointed out that there are a number of other writers of major stature at work in Russia today, though understandably he was inhibited from naming any of them.1 In fact, in the return to the moral concern, insight, and compassion which are the great heritage of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Solzhenitsyn has been by no means alone. On the contrary, he is merely primus inter pares among a whole school of writers who have made it their aim to digest and reassess Russia’s apocalyptic recent past, and in the light of it to reflect on man’s moral nature.