Valentin Rasputin Research Articles

Valentin Rasputin's prose about creativity as an aesthetic manifesto of the writer

The article reviews the prose by Valentin Rasputin, in which the writer expressed his aesthetic ideas about the nature of creativity. The short story “Down and upstream. Essay on a trip” (1972), and the short novels such as “"What to tell the crow” (1981), “Natasha” (1982), “Vision” (1997), “In bad weather” (2003) show the image of the artist in a situation of personal and creative self-reflection. In the image of the autobiographical hero-writer, Rasputin embodies the drama of the artist, overcoming the inconsistency of the rational and irrational sides of creativity. It is concluded that the laws of art and the mystery of creativity in the writer's prose are connected with unraveling the mystery of life and death, with comprehending the mystery of being. It is concluded that the plot of the artist’s self-reflection in the analyzed works acts as a kind of aesthetic manifesto of their author.

Peer Bullying in the Example of Valentin Rasputin’s story “French Lessons”

20. yüzyıl Rus edebiyatının en önemli yazarlarından biri olan Valentin Rasputin, içerisinde otobiyografik unsurları barındırdığı bilinen “Fransızca Dersleri” adlı öyküsünde zor koşullarda yaşamak zorunda olan bir çocuğun dramına yer vermektedir. Hikâyenin kahramanının en önemli özelliği eğitim için ailesinden ayrı kalmayı, açlık ve yalnızlıkla mücadele edebilmeyi küçücük yaşına rağmen göze alabilmesidir. Fakat bu zorlu koşulların yanı sıra onun mücadele etmesi gereken bir problemi daha vardır: Akran zorbalığı. Bu zor süreçte ona en büyük desteği öğretmeninin verdiği görülmektedir.
 Çağımızın en önemli problemlerinden biri olan akran zorbalığının geçmişte de var olduğu ve gelecekte de var olacağı bir gerçektir. Valentin Rasputin’in de “Fransızca Dersleri” adlı öyküsünde bu konuya değindiği görülmektedir.
 Çalışma, hikâyede ortaya çıkan akran zorbalığına ilişkin görünümleri tespit etmek amacıyla yapılmaktadır. İlk olarak, çalışmaya konu olan eser herhangi bir kayıt tutulmadan daha sonra ise akran zorbalığı odağında okunarak betimsel analizi yapılmaktadır. Elde edilen veriler eserde zorbalık şekillerine, kurbana, zorba tiplere ve zorbalık problemlerini çözme biçimlerine ilişkin yer alan görünümler başlıkları altında ayrıştırılarak analizleri yapılmaya çalışılmaktadır.

Fragile Landscape. Sacrifice of the Russian land

This essay analyses the individual’s alienation from the natural environment prompted by the commodification of nature. The analysis focuses on the novels “Proshchanie s Matyoroi” (Farewell to Matyora, 1976) by Valentin Rasputin and “Zona zatopleniya” (Flood Zone, 2015) by Roman Senchin and demonstrates how literature, both in the Soviet Union and in contemporary Russia, deals with the critical discourse on environmental issues, the protection of nature, human freedom, and the dignity of living beings. The two novels, written forty years apart, share the same subject: to build a hydroelectric power plant, a river is diverted from its path, vast territories are flooded, and the inhabitants of a Siberian village are be forced away from their homes. In the light of this affinity, this essay explores an eco-critical view as to how the conflict between nature and culture in Soviet and in present-day Russia can be represented through the motives of the clash between the old and the new world, civilization and wild nature, the urban and the natural environment. In particular, the two novels are linked by four cultural criteria: the mythography of a betrayed Eden, the representation of a world that offers no refuge from ecological disasters, the threat of a hegemonic oppression conducted either by the State or by powerful corporations at the expense of the local communities, and the ‘gothicization’ of the environment. Zona zatopleniyia can be read as a remake of Proshchanie s Materoi insofar as it denounces a system in which the technological innovations achieved in over half a century do not seem to be considered. At the same time, however, Senchin’s novel, starting from the end of the Soviet Union, highlights the environmental problems that have contributed to the end of the régime and suggests that old political models are no longer tenable in the new era. This starting point plays an important role for it defines nature no longer as a shelter from politics, but as a potential form of civil activity.

Father and His Family (Genre Originality of L. Petrushevskaya’s Story “The New Robinsons”, 1989)

The article deals with the genre originality of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's story ‘The New Robinsons’. The story, first published in 1989, masquerades as a Robinsonade, a dystopia, and a sample of village prose (with its admiration for the peasants and peasant women of pre-revolutionary times), but the true goal of Petrushevskaya is much more ambitious: the story is an invariant of the biblical story about the rebirth of humankind after a global catas-trophe. The very title of the story directly indicates the genre of robinsonade. One can easily single out elements of dystopia in the story with the help of text analysis, as well as inter-textual references to the prose of village writers (mainly, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Val-entin Rasputin). The key phrase of the story ‘The New Robinsons’ refers to biblical sources: ‘There was a boy and a girl for the continuation of the human race.’ In this light, it becomes clear why Petrushevskaya, seemingly casually, reports that the narrator’s father once in-jured ‘in the thigh’ and remained forever lame. It is a reference to Jacob, who was once in-jured ‘in the thigh’ when he fought with God. He, just like the narrator’s father, spent most of his life on the run, and was the one, from whom the twelve tribes of the Jewish people eventually originated.

Valentin Rasputin аnd Uzbek Literature: Reassembling Village Prose as Nation Building

Valentin Rasputin аnd Uzbek Literature: Reassembling Village Prose as Nation Building

The motive of native home returning in the prose of Fyodor Abramov and Valentin Rasputin

In a comparative typological analysis of the works of two classics of rural prose F. Abramov and V. Rasputin, the commonality of the motive of native home returning, associated with the motives for returning home and its restoration, is revealed, which is especially relevant in the context of Russian history and culture of the 20th-21st centuries. We substantiate that the native home image as a parental one, expanded to a metaphor of the native land, native country, the main spiritual value in the prose of both writers, gives the main characters of the works the fullness and meaningfulness of life, return to themselves, authenticity. We conclude that the native home image in the prose of two writers is associated with the image of destroyed, abandoned house or its loss, and with the motive of its acquisition, restoration. The work analyzes the novel by F. Abramov “The House” from the tetralogy “Brothers and Sisters” and the story “Bear Hunt”, as well as the stories by V. Rasputin “Birthday”, “The Hut”, the essay “Down and Upstream”, the story “The Fire”. The artistic image of native home and associated motives of returning home and home returning in the prose of two writers testify to the stability of this figurative-motive complex, the desire to strengthen it in Russian literature in its entirety and ambiguity as a moral support. The analysis is based on the axiological approach of V.E. Khalizeva, V.N. Zakharov’s concepts of ethnopoetics, on T.I. Radomskaya’s works. The study results can be used in school and university teaching of Russian literature history, culturology.

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

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...

Pendulum of time in Valentin Rasputin’s novel "Live and remember" ("Zhivi i pomni")

The study reveals specific ways of expressing the passage of time in the story "Live and Remember" by Valentin Rasputin. The study is aimed at demonstrating how the development of the plot, the dialectic of relationships between memory and oblivion, as well as the fluctuations in the heroes’ memories – all create the image of a pendulum. The applied methodology involved a linguostylistic analysis of the text. The author identifies linguistic means that help the writer to draw images of a pendulum-person and a pendulum-object. Special attention is paid to syntactic constructions of different types used to convey the ambivalence of the characters’ body and mind. The image of a pendulum and the motive of pendulum movement create the feeling of the onward march of time and the oncoming final date.

Notes on the close circle

N. Pereyaslov reminisces about contemporary authors who passed away in the early 21st c.: Sergey Esin, Valentin Rasputin, and Vyacheslav Dyogtev. The article is effectively a collection of delayed obituaries considering the works of the three writers in retrospect and recognising their respective contributions to modern Russian prose. Each of the three was personally known to Pereyaslov, so he shares his memories of them as writers and friends simultaneously, as well as his impressions of their books, like S. Esin’s sensational Diaries [Dnevniki], V. Rasputin’s late short stories, and V. Dyogtev’s prose that depicts numerous unpalatable and deplorable aspects of contemporary Russian history. Especially interesting is the recollection of the first reading of such provocative and controversial works as Dyogtev’s short stories and Rasputin’s Ivan’s Daughter, Ivan’s Mother [Doch Ivana, mat Ivana]: this memory reacquaints us with the living and breathing, and uninterrupted literary process where the writers portrayed in Pereyaslov’s article play an important role.

Patriarchal Primitivism. Dying Peasant Women and the Soviet Anti-Developmental Turn

This article investigates the role played by images of the female peasantry in the late Soviet intelligentsia’s questioning of developmental modernism. From the mid-1960s, Soviet culture was replete with mournful female peasants. Painter Viktor Popkov pioneered this trope in visual art with a series of canvases that portrayed old peasant women as wizened saints. Subsequent works, including Larisa Shepitko and Elem Klimov’s 1981 film Farewell (based on Valentin Rasputin’s novel Farewell to Matyora), adopted Popkov’s techniques to more directly question the legacy of Soviet development. The article uses such images to examine what I call “patriarchal primitivism” as a common response to crises of modernity among imperial powers. It frames cultural nostalgia for an essentialized past as an attempt to resolve what the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino termed the “crisis of presence” in his studies of mourning and healing rituals in southern Italy. In the Soviet case, depictions of peasant women served to raise environmental consciousness while fueling a conservative nationalism that relegated women to subordinate roles. As in African colonial contexts, their posture of opposition was not only tolerated but cultivated by a state seeking to renew its claim to legitimacy as the authentic voice of the people.

«Ламарк сибирской литературы» (к столетию В. П. Трушкина)

The paper is dedicated to the centenary of the birth of a well-known researcher of Siberian lit-erature, doctor of philological sciences, Professor Vasily Trushkin. The main milestones of the scientist’s creative path, his methodological principles as the “great worker of science” and the most significant systematist and bibliographer of literary Siberia are considered. The paper includes diary materials and the memoirs about V. Trushkin written by Valentin Raspu-tin and Anatoly Prelovsky, colleagues of the scientist at Irkutsk State University. A special place is given to the role of V. Trushkin in the discovery of the talent of Alexander Vampilov, a member of the university literary association, guided by the scientist.

Rivers of Noosphere Stories: Russian Natural-Philosophical Prose as Cultural Ecology

Abstract This article compares the Russian concept of ekologiia kul′tury (ecology of culture) to Western cultural ecology. Both ideas see human cultures evolving in close relations with their environment, but they sharply differ in their conclusions. Instead of highlighting literature’s potential as an ecological force, ekologiia kul′tury emphasizes morals, traditional values, and Christian ideology. Russian naturfilosofskaia proza (natural-philosophical prose) shares these features with ekologiia kul′tury, which this article shows by analyzing writings of rivers in it. Naturfilosofskaia proza is also an example of literature as cultural ecology, and this article shows how representations of rivers in the so-called noosphere stories by Sergei Zalygin, Valentin Rasputin, and Viktor Astaf´ev illustrate its function as an ecological force within cultural discourses.

Державный миф в поздней публицистике В. Распутина: «русская идея» в эсхатологическом контексте

The article is devoted to research of features of mythological model, which is reflected in the late journalism of Valentin Rasputin. The complex of interconnected myths is revealed, their historical roots are traced. The eschatological myth is considered; the author shows that the messianic idea of Russia’s unique role in the world is accompanied by the construction of the enemy image. Images of internal enemies (liberals) and external enemies (Europe and America) are demonized. The eschatological experiences of the crisis moments of “adjustment period” and the beginning of the 21st century are accompanied by utopian nostalgia for the “Golden Age”, which the writer saw in the historical background of Russia, particularly in the Soviet era. The article considers Rasputin’s utopian idea of power and the government leader. Denying liberal values, the writer asserts the idea of a strong ruler, whose main function is to “fulfill God’s laws”. Stalin is recognized as an example of a leader who expressed the «national spirit». Rasputin’s mythology has common features with the concept of “Third Rome” and with some categories of Old Russian autocratic ideology of the 16th century, as well as with the ideas of Old Believers. The article traces the ways of constructing the author’s myth. The writer’s mythology is based on non-critical use of concepts and myths and is based on archetypes of national mythology. Besides, the writer constructs the myth with the help of language tools, creating neologisms and using estimation vocabulary. Rasputin's mythological model reflects the conceptual core of conservative ideology.

Рецензия на книгу: Афанасьева-Медведева Г. В. Народное слово в рассказах и повестях Валентина Распутина: Словарь: В 2 т. Т. 1 / Авт.-сост. Г. В. Афанасьева-Медведева. Иркутск, [Б. и.], 2017. 432 с.

Рецензия на книгу: Афанасьева-Медведева Г. В. Народное слово в рассказах и повестях Валентина Распутина: Словарь: В 2 т. Т. 1 / Авт.-сост. Г. В. Афанасьева-Медведева. Иркутск, [Б. и.], 2017. 432 с.

Valentin Rasputin through the Eyes of the Czechs (Portrait and Around: A Few Thoughts)

Valentin Rasputin through the Eyes of the Czechs (Portrait and Around: A Few Thoughts)

ТРАНСФОРМАЦИЯ ЕВРЕЙСКОЙ ТЕМЫ В РУССКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ

The article deals, dash-like, with the development of Jewish subject matter in Russian literature: from taboo to self-reflection because of belonging to Jewry, from euphemisms of XIX and XX centuries to the open and proud declaration made by the conceptual Jew, Arkan Kariv, in his XXI century prose. Exemplified in fragments of writings by Dina Rubina, Friedrich Gorenstein, Valentin Rasputin, Alexandr Melikhov and Jury Karabchievsky, some facets of Jewish theme are discussed. In Kariv’s novels Interpreter and Once in Bishkek, a Jew — outsider, pariah, and self-reflecting intellectual — turns into a brutal leader named Martyn Zilber. A special subtlety of this novels’ structure is given by the fact of palimpsest: the reader understands that behind the Kariv’s writings is the novel by his father, Jury Karabchievsky, as much as behind Martyn Zilber’s father stands Alexandr Zilber, the hero of Karabchievsky’s novel.

Arboreal: A Collection of New Woodland Writing by Adrian Cooper

behavior that many characterize as “inhuman ” or “inhumane.” The novelist’s mission embodies the ideal that the Roman playwright Terence enunciated when he had a character say, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am human, and nothing of that which is human is alien to me). A novelist is this kind of human, who is not alien even to the vilest acts of human beings. Ganguly has written an important book, a provocative book, a sensitive book. Perhaps, in the spirit of discourse, she won’t object to some corrections and some animadversions. She writes of the “five or six world languages—English, Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, French, and Hindi. “Mandarin” is an oral dialect of Chinese: millions of people speak “Mandarin ,” but no one writes in “Mandarin”: the Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan, for example , comes from Shandong province and speaks Shandong dialect, not Mandarin; just as Mao Zedong spoke Hunan dialect, and Deng Xiaoping spoke Sichuan dialect; but they all wrote in Chinese. I question Ganguly’s emphasis on visual witnessing. Cognitive scientists have researched visual witnessing as distinctly unreliable (see The Invisible Gorilla), and perhaps Ganguly does not give sufficient weight to the numbing effect of so much human cruelty that appears in the media. Her prose may be more accessible to academics whose tolerance for jargon is greater than mine, but I had to cancel my normal understanding of “remedial” or “remediation” because Ganguly means by these words, specifically, “rendering in another form.” These animadversions aside, I do not begrudge the time reading this thoughtful analysis, not only of the post-1989 world novel, but a sensitive report on the temper of our times. EugeneEoyang Bloomington,Indiana Arboreal: A Collection of New Woodland Writing. Ed. Adrian Cooper. Toller Fratrum, UK. Little Toller Books. 2016. 326 pages. Arboreal: A Collection of New Woodland Writing focuses on the relationship between people and trees, between societies and forests. Each selection is subtitled with the name of a particular forest or woodland. While Arboreal is set in Britain, it would be of great interest to anyone interested in history or the environment, and the collection has something to offer readers of several genres: the prose selections range from creative nonfiction to short story, and poetry and photography are also included. It is a handsome book that would be a welcome addition to the library of anyone with an interest in traditional woodcraft, arboriculture , ecology, or natural history. The poetry in this collection is superb and varied in style. Take, for example, Adam Thorpe’s “Nine Oaks: Curridge, Berkshire.” Thorpe captures the tree’s essence in the opening stanza: “Every tree is an interlude between applauses / of air, an upside-down splash or that lone cloud’s image. / The limbs go everywhere there is a taste of light.” For a demonstration of range, consider Richard Skelton’s series of concrete poems entitled “Thwaite,” from the Old Norse word for “clearing.” The prose offerings are equally strong. Ali Smith’s story “The Green Stuff: Wandlebury Wood, Cambridge” makes an old allegory fresh through her description of a “green child” and a landowner’s son. It is a haunting, incomplete narrative. The landowner’s son must confront his notions of ownership and memory when the inexplicable happens. Will Ashon’s historical piece, “The Gypsy Stone,” gives a rambling (in the best sense of the word) history of Epping Forest and the role this place had on the fortunes of the transient people who lived there before the twentieth century. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 89 Valentin Rasputin Ivan’s Daughter Trans. Margaret Winchell Three String Books Ivan’s Daughter is a collection of shorter pieces capturing the experience of postSoviet Russia from Valentin Rasputin’s pointedly ruralist viewpoint. Though often controversial in his political views, Rasputin’s perspectives on the rapid change of the Perestroika period and beyond are vital to outsiders who might seek to understand the mind-set that drives contemporary Russian social and foreign policy. Oy, Caramba! Ed. Ilan Stavans University of New Mexico Press This reissue and expansion of 1994’s Tropical Synagogues samples the crosspollination of Jewish identity with magical realism in fiction and serves as a...

Книга «Сибирь, Сибирь...» В. Распутина как лирико-философско-публицистический трактат

Книга «Сибирь, Сибирь...» В. Распутина как лирико-философско-публицистический трактат

Hartley, Janet M. Siberia: A History of the People (review)

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 560 (p. 14). Nevertheless, with this sympathetic, but far from uncritical, portrait Hughes tells an absorbing story of a remarkable, enigmatic and controversial figure the like of which seems now to be part of a vanished age. University of Exeter Roger Cockrell Hartley, Janet M. Siberia: A History of the People. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2014. xx + 289 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £25.00. People make places, and the book’s subtitle is especially appropriate for a vast region, some of it not far from wilderness, penetrated over the centuries by a whole range of immigrants. Janet M. Hartley is by no means the first to make a scholarly expedition into the subject, noting the work of predecessors such as W. Bruce Lincoln, Alan Wood, James Forsyth and Yuri Slezkine in particular. However, she does bring to her work the keenness of a convert, finding her first inspiration in the rich records of the garrison records of Gizhiga, a remote post on the Sea of Okhotsk in the Russian far northeast, which she investigated during research for a previous publication. This has led her to further visits to archives in Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Krasnoiarsk, Omsk and Tomsk as well as Moscow. The result is an engaging study of peasants, townsfolk and other categories of inhabitants throughout the history of Siberia in an approach that is a mixture of the chronological and the thematic. Hartley avers that special problems of administration involving the complex relationship between centre and periphery would require another book. She nevertheless puts the peasantry in their appropriate setting, where the customs of the village competed with the demands of local government. As many as 130 differentelementsinpeasantdresswereidentifiedintheearlynineteenthcentury, the number diminishing with the arrival of the railroad and immigrants from European Russia later on. Today, the Russian population of Siberia constitutes 84 per cent of the whole, and old dialects are dead or dying, making the problem of constructing a Siberian language virtually impossible. However, even if many of the remaining 16 per cent have narrower horizons confined to their ancestral lands, there is a strong regional consciousness among the majority. This depends to a large extent on the towns that punctuate the vastnesses. Originally no more than trading posts or stockades, some of them such as Krasnoiarsk or Novosibirsk have become significant industrial centres. The book has more on the earlier than the more recent period, but nevertheless contains engaging vignettes of contemporary urban life drawn from the author’s own experiences, along with some evocative illustrations. REVIEWS 561 Apart from its size and weather, Siberia is best known for its exile system, described powerfully by some of those who experienced it such as Dostoevskii, while helping to form the outlook of V. I. Ulianov who allegedly drew his revolutionarypseudonymfromtheRiverLena.Eventoday,alibrarianinIrkutsk defines Siberians as ‘the children of the Decembrists’ (p. 130). Willy-nilly, they are also the children of the Leninist and Stalinist revolutions, however much some of them would like to deny a key part of their past. Hartley does not hold back from the horrors of the Civil War, if treating Reds and Whites in an evenhanded manner, and the miseries of the ‘Gulags’, although also acknowledging that genuine idealism helped to construct the Soviet Union. On the new, post-Soviet Russia, she also strives for balance, concluding with a long quotation from Valentin Rasputin. Siberia is exceptional, he declares, in retaining wilderness until recent times, but also experiencing ‘the immense unprecedented influence of our economic activity’ in its exploitation of natural resources. This coincidence tests the human race and attracts people ‘to feel in themselves the boundary between the temporal and the eternal, the inconstant and the true, the ruined and the preserved’ (p. 251). Thebookcouldnotbethelastwordonitschallengingsubject,norindeeddoes it claim to be so, falling into the ‘scientific-popular’ genre that characterizes the Yale imprint. But, building on the achievements of its predecessors, it certainly adds to them. Most of all, the enthusiasm which pervades the work will be infectious, spreading the understanding of an important part not only of Russia, but also of the world, and encouraging others to join the growing number of ‘Sibiroveds...

Jones, Ryan Tucker. Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 (review)

REVIEWS 561 Apart from its size and weather, Siberia is best known for its exile system, described powerfully by some of those who experienced it such as Dostoevskii, while helping to form the outlook of V. I. Ulianov who allegedly drew his revolutionarypseudonymfromtheRiverLena.Eventoday,alibrarianinIrkutsk defines Siberians as ‘the children of the Decembrists’ (p. 130). Willy-nilly, they are also the children of the Leninist and Stalinist revolutions, however much some of them would like to deny a key part of their past. Hartley does not hold back from the horrors of the Civil War, if treating Reds and Whites in an evenhanded manner, and the miseries of the ‘Gulags’, although also acknowledging that genuine idealism helped to construct the Soviet Union. On the new, post-Soviet Russia, she also strives for balance, concluding with a long quotation from Valentin Rasputin. Siberia is exceptional, he declares, in retaining wilderness until recent times, but also experiencing ‘the immense unprecedented influence of our economic activity’ in its exploitation of natural resources. This coincidence tests the human race and attracts people ‘to feel in themselves the boundary between the temporal and the eternal, the inconstant and the true, the ruined and the preserved’ (p. 251). Thebookcouldnotbethelastwordonitschallengingsubject,norindeeddoes it claim to be so, falling into the ‘scientific-popular’ genre that characterizes the Yale imprint. But, building on the achievements of its predecessors, it certainly adds to them. Most of all, the enthusiasm which pervades the work will be infectious, spreading the understanding of an important part not only of Russia, but also of the world, and encouraging others to join the growing number of ‘Sibiroveds’. The fact that these have for many years included contributors to a Siberian Seminar and a journal entitled Sibirica deserved mention, perhaps. Certainly, in a fairly full bibliography for this kind of book, Practical Dictionary of Siberia and the North edited by V. D. Golubchikova and Z. I. Khvtisiashvili (Moscow, 2005) should have been included. History Department Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Jones, Ryan Tucker. Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. xi + 296 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Appendices. Notes. Index. £35.99. Empire of Extinction is a cautionary tale that provides grim proof of the moral to the fable of the man who killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The epic story of Russia’s early conquest of Siberia, lured by the commercial SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 562 riches derived from the hunting and slaughter of the taiga’s fur-bearing mammals — most famously and lucratively the sable — has been well told, as, for example, in Raymond H. Fisher’s pioneering The Russian Fur Trade (Berkeley, CA, 1943) as well as other more recent works on Siberian history. As the terrestrial killing fields on the mainland became increasingly exhausted, Russian explorers, hunters, merchants and mariners in the mid eighteenth century turned their attention to the pursuit of the abundant aquatic animal life of the North Pacific Ocean, in particular the vast multi-islanded region stretching from the Kamchatka peninsula, through the Aleutian archipelago to the north American littoral. This is the remote, perilous, icy seascape which Ryan Tucker Jones dubs ‘the empire of extinction’, and the hunters’ prey the ‘strange beasts of the sea’, which give his book its title. The relentless, reckless hunt of the sea otter (Enhydra lutris) in particular also led to the establishment of Russia’s first overseas colony in present-day Alaska. Jones’s meticulously researched narrative not only describes the exploits of Russia’s Arctic adventurers and animal executioners, but also provides an analysis and object lesson in the close three-way relationship between the near extermination of the region’s marine species (in the case of Steller’s see-cow [Rhytina borealis] the total extinction), the pursuit of scientific knowledge (zoological, botanical, oceanographic, ethnological and cartographical) and the process of colonial imperialism. It is also somewhat ironic that a leading role in the Russian Empire’s expansion across the Pacific was played not so much by Russians as by foreign scholars and sailors. Vitus Bering (Danish), Daniel Messerschmidt, Georg Steller and...