THE RUSSIAN VILLAGE WRITERS

Abstract

The so called ‘village writers’ played an important role in the Russian literature of the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century. From a social point of view their work can be seen as an indictment against the injustice done to the kolkhoz-farmers, the terrible condition these people lived in after World War II, and the madness of the agricultural politics of the USSR. Their work is often amazingly critical, considering that it has been written so shortly after the period of Stalinist terror.From a literary point of view ‘village literature’ is the first attempt of serious Soviet writers to escape from the straitjacket of officially prescribed socialist realism. The only way to circumvent Soviet censorship was to return to the critical realism of the nineteenth century. Russian village literature is therefore in fact a conservative movement. Another conservative trait is its nationalism. Russian village writers are the heirs of the nineteenth-century conservative, nationalist Slavophile movement. Some of these writers, like Vasili Belov and Valentin Rasputin, have a strong moral view on life, their aim is to give their demoralized countrymen ‘new’ moral values, which are in fact the old moral values of the neglected Russian peasant.