The works by the Russian “village prose” authors, the so-called derevenshchiki, apparently belong to the most-studied texts in late-Soviet literature (1950s–80s). They were discussed in papers published not only in Russian but also in English, German, and French. The wonderful monograph by St. Petersburg-based scholar Anna Razuvalova, however, is not just another book on this issue. It seems to be closer to a synthesis of different approaches to the “villagers'” prose and worldviews than anything else, and, at the same time, it revisits many beliefs hardened among the critics from the 1970s–90s.
In the papers of western academics and journalists, “the villagers” were usually interpreted through their political position, as manifestations of political nationalism or political conservatism hidden from the Soviet public sphere by censorship. In her books of 1992 and 2004, Kathleen Parthe drew attention on this unilateralism of interpretation and returned to the study of the artistic means used in the derevenshchiki's prose. While referring to Parthe's research, Razuvalova takes the next step. She presents the “villagers'” progress as the artistic creation of cultural conservatism that acquired political meanings in the circumstances of late-Soviet ideological erosion. In all instances, Razuvalova strives to present the “villagers'” viewpoint “from within,” explaining their own cultural and social logic as they understood it themselves.
The main topic of this book is the correlations between the core motifs of the “villagers'” novels and short stories; the writers' social and cultural attitudes; and the reception of their texts among cultural elites. In fact, Razuvalova supposes that the “villagers'” opuses were aimed at the construction of a new conservative cultural identity in late-Soviet society; in other words, at the “invention of tradition.” From the very beginning, this conservative movement was influenced by Stalinist-style nationalism, but it was primarily cultural and social, not political. This approach allows Razuvalova to disengage the nationalist and conservative attitudes on an imaginary map of the Soviet intellectual movements, and to focus on the literary production of identity and social emotions.
The book consists of five chapters and a conclusion. In the first chapter, the “villagers'” conservatism is presented as a cultural innovation. Chapter 2 is focused on the “villagers'” psychological complex of cultural inferiority; this complex was connected—in the “villagers'” private letters and public speeches—with a feeling of moral superiority over these writers of the Soviet intelligentsia. Razuvalova supposes here that the main source for such attitudes was the experience of obstacle negotiation, while joining the intelligentsia elites who were only condescending to the poorly-educated young writers of kolkhoz origin. Chapter 3 considers how the pochvennye critics—that is, conservative, irrational, and nationalist-oriented—interpreted the “villagers'” writing as the key successors of 19th century classical Russian prose, and inscribed them into the national literary canon. At the same time, however, the pochvennye critics made the very notion of the Russian canon more anti-intellectual and intuitivist. Razuvalova demonstrates how these critics used the “villagers'” opuses as an argument in their promotion of a “holistic,” anti-avant garde, anti-structuralist, and covertly anti-Semitic approach to art. The fourth chapter turns to the correlation of ecological and anti-modernization motifs in the “villagers'” prose. The fifth chapter discusses how the anti-Semitic and anti-Caucasian ideas appeared in the works of the “villagers” starting in the late 1970s. At last, in the conclusion, Razuvalova focuses on contemporary, post-Soviet authors who are considered in criticism as the aesthetic and social successors of the “villagers.” Notwithstanding the “villagers'” silent resistance to Bolshevist violent modernization, these “heirs,” like Zakhar Prilepin or Mikhail Tarkovsky, present the Soviet period as “the good old days,” like pre-kolkhoz village life in “villagers'” works.
The less persuasive section of this wonderful monograph is its second chapter. The “villagers'” enemies, intellectuals of Russia's “two capitals,” are depicted predominantly according to resentful memoirs of “villagers” and “fundamentalist” critics as the snobbish holders of heritable symbolic capital. The broader contextualization allows us to see that a significant share of the “intelligentsia writers” of the 1960s and 1970s who later became opponents of the “villagers” had been the children of Soviet elites who perished in or survived the GULAG. The fiercest critic of the “villagers,” Friedrich Gorenstein, was the son of an arrested provincial professor of economics. In his youth, Gorenstein had to serve as an unskilled laborer. Later he was educated as a mining engineer. It would perhaps have been more useful to describe the struggle for symbolic and cultural capital between the “villagers” and “intelligentsia writers” of the 1960s as a fight between two groups of disadvantaged people.
Taken as a whole, however, Razuvalova's monograph is one of the most innovative books on late Soviet literature published over the past few years. This is a deep, thoroughly-written work embracing a very wide range of issues. Its bibliographical list is vast. This book could be recommended for everybody who is interested in Soviet culture and the evolution of Soviet society.
