Valentin
Rasputin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Valentin Grigoriyevich Rasputin (Russian:
Валентин Григорьевич Распутин) (born March 15,
1937) is a Russian writer. He was born and lived
much of his life in the Irkutsk Oblast in
Eastern Siberia. Rasputin's works depict
rootless urban characters and the fight for
survival of centuries-old traditional rural ways
of life. Rasputin covers complex questions of
ethics and spiritual revival.
Biography
Valentin Rasputin was born on March 15, 1937
in the village of Ust-Uda (Усть-Уда) in Irkutsk
Oblast of Russia. His father worked for a
village cooperative store, and his mother was a
nurse. Soon after his birth, the Rasputin family
moved to the village of Atalanka in the same
Ust-Uda district, where Valentin spent his
childhood. Both villages, which were located on
the bank of the Angara River, do not exist in
their original locations any more, as much of
the Angara Valley was flooded by the Bratsk
Reservoir in the 1960s, and the villages were
relocated to higher ground. Later, the writer
remembered growing up in Siberia as a difficult,
but happy time. "As soon as we kids learned how
to walk, we would toddle to the river with our
fishing rods; still a tender child, we would run
to the taiga, which would begin right outside
the village, to pick berries and mushrooms;
since young age, we would get into a boat and
take the oars..."
When Valentin finished the 4-year elementary
school in Atalanka in 1948, his parents sent the
precocious boy to a middle school and then high
school in the district center, Ust-Uda, some 50
km away from his home village. He was the first
child from his village to continue his education
in this way.
Rasputin graduated from Irkutsk University in
1959, and started working for local Komsomol
newspapers in Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk. He
published his first short story in 1961.
An
important point in Rasputin's early literary
career was a young writers' seminar in September
1965 in Chita led by Vladimir Chivilikhin (Владимир
Чивилихин), who encouraged the young writer's
literary aspirations and recommended him for
membership in the prestigious Union of Soviet
Writers. Since then Rasputin has considered
Chivilikhin his "literary godfather".
In
1967, after the publication of his Money for
Maria, Rasputin was indeed admitted to the Union
of Soviet Writers. Over the next three decades,
he published a number of novels, many became
both widely popular among the Russian reading
public and critically acclaimed.
In
1980, after researching the Battle of Kulikovo
for two years, Rasputin was baptised by an
Orthodox priest in nearby Yelets.
Rasputin's literary work is closely connected to
his activism on social and environmental issues.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Rasputin, called
by some the leading figure of the "Siberian
environmental lobby", took an active part in the
campaign for protection of Lake Baikal and
against the diversion of Siberian fresh water to
Central Asian republics. In the 1990s he
participated in the nationalist opposition
movement.
Having spent most of his adult life in Irkutsk,
Rasputin remains one of the leading intellectual
figures of this Siberian city. He was an
honoured guest for many events in the city of
Irkutsk, including the unveilings of the
monuments to Czar Alexander III and Admiral
Kolchak. He organized the readers' conference in
Irkutsk Central Scientific Library named after
Molchanov-Sibirsky.
Valentin Rasputin's daughter Maria died in the
2006 crash of S7 Airlines Flight 778.
Rasputin's writing
Rasputin is closely associated with a
movement in post-war Soviet literature known as
"village prose," or sometimes "rural prose" (деревенская
проза). Beginning in the time of the Khrushchev
Thaw (оттепель), village prose was praised for
its stylistic and thematic departures from
socialist realism. Village prose works usually
focused on the hardships of the Soviet
peasantry, espoused an idealized picture of
traditional village life, and implicitly or
explicitly criticized official modernization
projects. Rasputin's 1979 novel Farewell to
Matyora, which depicts a fictional Siberian
village which is to be evacuated and cleared so
that a hydroelectric dam can be constructed
further down the Angara River, was considered
the epitome of this genre. The opening paragraph
below is a good example of Rasputin's writing
style (exceptional even for the village prose
writers), and the novel's theme of natural
cycles disprupted by modernization:
Once more spring had come, one more in the
never-ending cycle, but for Matyora this spring
would be the last, the last for both the island
and the village that bore the same name. Once
more, rumbling passionately, the ice broke,
piling up mounds on the banks, and the liberated
Angara River opened up, stretching out into a
mighty, sparkling flow. Once more the water
gushed boisterously at the island’s upper tip,
before cascading down both channels of the
riverbed; once more greenery flared on the
ground and in the greens, the first rains soaked
the earth, the swifts and swallows flew back,
and at dusk in the bogs the awakened frogs
croaked their love of life. It had all happened
many times before. (From Rasputin's novel
Farewell to Matyora, translated by Antonina
Bouis, 1979)
Rasputin's nonfiction works contain similar
themes, often in support of relevant political
causes. He directed particularly trenchant
criticism at large-scale dam building, like the
project that flooded his own hometown, and water
management projects, like the diversion of the
Siberian rivers to Central Asia. He argued that
these projects were destructive not simply in an
ecological sense, but in a moral sense as well.
In
"Siberia, Siberia" (first published in 1991),
Rasputin compares what he considers modern moral
relativism with the traditional beliefs of the
people of Russkoye Ustye, who believed in
reincarnation. According to Rasputin, when
burying their dead, the Russkoye Ustye settlers
would often bore a hole in the coffin, to make
it easier for the soul to come back to be
reborn; but if the deceased was a bad person,
they would drive an aspen stake through the
grave, to keep his soul from coming back into
the world of living again. The writer is not
ambiguous as to which category the souls of the
"modernizers" should belong:
When reflecting on the actions of today's
"river-rerouting" father figures, who are
destroying our sacred national treasures up hill
and down with the haste of an invading army, you
involuntarily turn to this experience: it would
not be a bad idea for them to know that not
everything is forgiven at the time of death.
Some critics accused Rasputin of idealizing
village life and slipping into anti-modern
polemics. The journal Voprosy literatury
published an on-going debate on the question,
"Is the Village Prose of Valentin Rasputin
Anti-Modern?" Controversy intensified in the
1980s, as Rasputin became associated with the
nationalist organization Pamyat (Память:
"Memory"). Originally formed to preserve
monuments and examples of traditional Russian
architecture, Pamyat became increasingly known
for a reactionary, antisemitic form of Russian
nationalism. Rasputin has been criticized for
his involvement with this organization, as well
as for making his own antisemitic statements.
Rasputin himself argues that his alleged
antisemitic statements have been exaggerated and
taken out of context. In July, 1991, Rasputin
signed the open letter "A Word to the People",
other signatories of which were mostly Soviet
functionaries opposed to Gorbachev's reforms. In
1992, Valentin Rasputin joined the National
Salvation Front (a coalition of radical
opposition forces), nominally belonging to its
leadership.
