Russian village prose : the radiant past
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Russian village prose : the radiant past
Princeton University Press, 1992
- : pbk
Related Bibliography 1 items
Available at 4 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [149]-187) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Kathleen Parth offers the first comprehensive examination of the controversial literary movement Russian Village Prose. From the 1950s to the decline of the movement in the 1970s, Valentin Rasputin, Fedor Abramov, and other writers drew on "luminous" memories of their rural childhoods to evoke a thousand-year-old pattern of life that was disappearing as they wrote. In their lyrical descriptions of a vanishing world, they expressed nostalgia for Russia's past and fears for the nation's future; they opposed collectivized agriculture, and fought to preserve traditional art and architecture and to protect the environment. Assessing the place of Village Prose in the newly revised canon of twentieth-century Russian literature, Parth maintains that these writers consciously ignored and undermined Socialist Realism, and created the most aesthetically coherent and ideologically important body of published writings to appear in the Soviet Union between Stalin's death and Gorbachev's ascendancy. In the 1970s, Village Prose was seen as moderately nationalist and conservative in spirit. After 1985, however, statements by several of its practitioners caused the movement to be reread as a possible stimulus for chauvinistic, anti-Semitic groups like Pamyat. This important development is treated here with a thorough discussion of all the political implications of these rural narratives. Nevertheless, the center of Parth's work remains her exploration of the parameters that constitute a "code of reading" for works of Village Prose. The appendixes contain a translation and analysis of a particularly fine example of Russian Village Prose--Aleksei Leonov's "Kondyr."
by "Nielsen BookData"