Cosa y constructo

Introduction

―Правда в памяти.‖389

In contrast to the case of Platonov, memory is a theme which can easily and immediately be identified as central to Valentin Rasputin‘s work and the fiction of all the ‗village prose‘ writers (derevenshchiki). Indeed, it is precisely the vision of a better past in which old traditions and values have been preserved that is the defining feature of village prose.390 As a result of this, the majority of critical studies of Rasputin‘s writings include an interpretation of the role and meaning of memory in his stories. Galina Belaia talks of Rasputin‘s ‗tema pamiati chelovecheskoi, na kotoroi stoit mir‘.391

This perception of memory as the foundation of Rasputin‘s worldview, one with a strong moral dimension, is shared by a number of critics. Thus, for example, Teresa Polowy talks of an ‗ethical concept of ―moral memory‖‘, and A.F. Lapchenko notes that ‗V poiskakh opor, ogradaiushchikh nravstvennost‘ ot poter‘, vsemi svoimi proizvedeniiami V. Rasputin utverzhdaet aktivnuiu dukhovnuiu silu pamiati.‘392 For Günther Hasenkamp, Rasputin‘s main theme is the loss of a worldview based on ‗spiritual memory‘, which in linking present action to the past acts as a guarantor of ethical behaviour.393

389 _{Valentin Rasputin, ‗Proshchanie s Materoi‘, in Valentin Rasputin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia,}

2 vols, Moscow, 1990, ii, pp. 201-380 (p. 343).

390

Parthé, Russian Village Prose, pp. 9-11.

391 _{Galina Belaia, ‗Na glubine: Razmyshleniia nad prozoi V. Rasputina‘, Literaturnoe} obozrenie, 1982, 1, pp. 11-15 (p. 15).

392

Teresa Polowy, The Novellas of Valentin Rasputin: Genre, Language and Style, New York, 1989, p. 11, and A.F. Lapchenko, Chelovek i zemlia v russkoi sotsial‟no-filosofskoi proze 70-kh

godov, Leningrad, 1985, p. 15.

The theme of memory also figures as a part of a number of ‗folk‘ approaches to Rasputin‘s stories. Constance Link, for example, sees memory as an access to a parallel, universal world in Rasputin‘s fiction.394

Although the current study does not share this particular interpretation, the emphasis on the role of folk imagery in Rasputin‘s texts is of interest. Folk imagery and belief feature prominently in Rasputin‘s writing, including in his handling of the theme of memory.395 An obvious example is Rasputin‘s evocation of the dilemma faced by Dar‘ia in Proshchanie s Materoi (1976): her dismay at being forced to abandon the graves of her ancestors is expressed in terms of traditional Russian beliefs about the power and importance of the dead.396 It is the premise of the following discussion, however, that folk motifs appear in Rasputin‘s writings as a part of the traditional Russian way of life that is the fabric of his work, rather than as a serious attempt to reconstruct a mythical worldview where sacred and profane worlds exist side by side. In common with many of the other derevenshchiki, Rasputin took the details of traditional village life with all its customs and beliefs as the raw material of his stories. As will be seen, the rural setting to his stories takes on an increasingly emblematic character over the course of Rasputin‘s career, evoking his perception of the tragic and fatal demise of a better way of life.

Galina Belaia has described the framework of Rasputin‘s worldview in his fiction as the ‗obraz edinogo mira‘, which is an ‗ideal‘naia proektsiia‘ and a ‗voploshchenie idei edinoi Vselennoi‘.397

In this chapter, the theme of memory in Rasputin‘s fiction is explored in its relationship to this vision of an ideally whole world. This view of the world in terms of an essential tselostnost‟ can in part be interpreted as Rasputin‘s inheritance of a generally traditional, rural, Russian worldview with its mixture of Christian and pre-Christian ideas on the

394 _{Constance Link, ‗Symbolism of the Sacred: The Novels of Valentin Rasputin‘, unpublished}

doctoral dissertation from Indiana University, 1983, p. 215.

395 _{For a discussion of the folk imagery in Proshchanie s Materoi see Link, ‗Symbolism of the}

Sacred‘, pp. 153-62.

396

See also Irena Maryniak‘s discussion of the pre-Christian Siberian beliefs about the dead in: Irena Maryniak, Spirit of the Totem: Religion and Myth in Soviet Fiction 1964-1988, London, 1995, pp. 62-63.

unity of the living and the dead, of the human and the natural worlds – elements which are particularly evident in Rasputin‘s writing during the 1960s and 1970s. In the following discussion, however, it will be argued that Rasputin‘s ‗obraz edinogo mira‘ is also informed by the classical Slavophile concept of existence as ‗tsel‘nost bytiia‘. These ideas, it will be contended, were mainly absorbed by Rasputin through the prism of the Russian nationalist debate which became increasingly active in the Soviet Union from the 1960s onwards. This debate, which initially existed on the unofficial level in samizdat publications, had become a part of official discourse by the mid-1980s following Gorbachev‘s policy of glasnost‟.398

The village prose writers, including Rasputin, have been active participants in this debate in all its stages up to the present day.

Modern Russian nationalism, like its pre-Revolutionary antecedent, takes its intellectual framework predominantly from the early Slavophile thinkers, and in particular Kireevskii and Khomiakov. Their works, which were officially banned for most of the Soviet period, were appearing in samizdat editions by the 1960s, and were officially republished in the late 1970s.399 James Scanlan has argued that Slavophile ideas were a central element of dissident nationalist debate from the 1960s onwards, and by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union had become ‗a blueprint for national salvation‘.400 John Dunlop notes that Dostoevskii, whose ideas inspired generations of Russian nationalists from the writers of Vekhi, through to Solzhenitsyn and the other authors of Iz-pod glyb, remains probably the single most influential thinker for modern Russian nationalism.401 In effect, many ideas originally expressed by the early Slavophiles have been absorbed by modern Russian

398 _{For detailed accounts of the Russian nationalist debate since the 1960s, see Peter J. S.}

Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After, London, 2000, and Kevin O‘Connor, Intellectuals and Apparatchiks: Russian Nationalism and the Gorbachev

Revolution, Oxford, 2006.

399 _{James P. Scanlan, ‗Interpretations and Uses of Slavophilism in Recent Russian Thought‘, in.}

Scanlan (ed.), Russian Thought after Communism, pp. 31-61 (p. 31); Duncan, Russian

Messianism, p. 70.

400 _{Scanlan, ‗Interpretations and Uses of Slavophilism‘, p. 45.}

401 _{John B. Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism, Princeton, NJ, 1983, p.}

nationalism through Dostoevskii‘s interpretation and development of them. It is worth noting the particularly influential status of Dostoevskii‘s Dnevnik

pisatelia and Besy in nationalist debate in general, and for Rasputin and other derevenshchiki in particular.402 Dostoevskii originally saw the theme of Besy as describing how in Russia:

the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine, that is, into the Nechaevs and Serno-Solovieviches, et al. These are drowned or will be drowned, and the healed man, from whom the devils departed, sits at the feet of Jesus.403

However, as Joseph Frank has argued, although Dostoevskii clearly would have liked to believe in this redemptive outcome for Russia, ‗What he saw all around, and what he would depict in his novel, was the process of infection and self-destruction rather than the end result of purification.‘404 In Besy, Dostoevskii takes to an extreme Kireevskii and Khomiakov‘s concern about the destructive effect of Western rationalism on the tselostyni and sobornyi Russian world. It is the novel‘s extraordinarily prescient vision of a nation possessed by alien ideals hurling itself towards self-destruction which has such resonance for modern Russian nationalism, as it did for Dostoevskii‘s contemporaries. It justifies nationalist rejection of Western modes of thought or government as irrelevant and dangerous for Russia. Through Besy, the heritage of damage done to Russia by imported ideas is traced in nationalist debate in a straight line from nineteenth-century rationalism and materialism, through communism and up to the present.

The émigré Russian thinker Ivan Il‘in, another inheritor of classical Slavophile thought, is a more recent influence on mainstream nationalist thinking, and one whom Rasputin refers to in a number of his articles. Il‘in‘s popularity dates from the publication of his 1950 article ‗Chto sulit miru

402

Parthé, ‗Russian Village Prose in Paraliterary Space‘, pp. 231-32.

403 _{Quote from a letter of Dostoevskii to Apollon Maikov cited in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky:} The Miraculous Years 1865-1871, London, 1995, p. 412.

raschlenenie Rossii?‘ in Russia in 1990.405

In it, Il‘in sets out his pessimistic vision of the disorderly disintegration of a post-communist Soviet Union into a ‗gigantic Balkans‘ ripe for exploitation by the West, a vision which appeared prophetic for nationalists of many hues in the early 1990s.406 Il‘in argued that

Россия есть не случайное нагромождение территорий и племен, и не искусственно слаженный ‗механизм‘ ‗областей‘, но живой,

исторически выросший и культурно оправдавшийся ОРГАНИЗМ, не подлежащий произвольному расчленению.407 In Il‘in‘s collected writings on his country, Nashi zadachi, Russia appears as an ideal and divinely determined whole with a unique historical destiny to follow its own path, the ‗Russian idea‘: ‗Nam net spaseniia v zapadnichestve. U nas svoi puti i svoi zadachi. I v etom – smysl russkoi idei.‘408

In general, the relation between modern nationalist thinking and its sources is one that can best be described as a process of eclectic borrowing and appropriation that frequently severs particular ideas from the original context in which they were conceived.409 One example of this is to be found in the application of the Slavophile concept of Russia‘s essential samobytnost‟, or otherness from the West. The modern nationalist polemic is based on

samobytnost‟, but for the most part ignores the importance of Russian

Orthodoxy to this idea in the early Slavophilism of Kireevksii, Khomiakov and Aksakov to Dostoevskii and Il‘in. The reception of Il‘in‘s thinking is another example of this same phenomenon. As Philip Grier has shown, Il‘in‘s ‗Russian national dictatorship‘ has frequently been taken out of the overall context of his political vision, strongly based on the rule of law, to justify authoritarian government in Russia.410 Rasputin is in this respect a typical participant in the contemporary nationalist debate, as his writings borrow freely from various

405 _{Philip T. Grier, ‗The Complex Legacy of Ivan Il‘in‘, in Scanlan (ed.), Russian Thought after} Communism, pp. 165-86 (p. 169).

406

See Grier‘s article cited above for a full discussion of the reactions and interpretations of Il‘in‘s thought in Russia in the 1990s.

407 _{Il‘in‘s emphasis. Il‘in, Nashi zadachi, i, p. 245.} 408

Ibid., p. 318.

409 _{James P. Scanlan, ‗Overview‘, in Scanlan (ed.), Russian Thought after Communism, pp. 3-}

10 (p. 9).

parts of the Slavophile inheritance, without providing a coherent discussion of the individual thinkers‘ works.

The question of the relationship between the village prose movement and the rise of an increasingly aggressive Russian nationalism is controversial, and has been the subject of a highly polarised debate.411 The fact that the

derevenshchiki and nationalist circles seem to have felt drawn to each other is

hardly surprising. The increasing interest in a vision of nation inspired by pre- Revolutionary Slavophile ideas and the lyrical image of a more authentic Russian past in village prose can be seen as springing from the same social and political situation in the Soviet Union. This, argues Kevin O‘Connor, was ‗an increasing Russian awareness of and sensitivity to the connections between the problems of contemporary society and the destruction of the country‘s pre- revolutionary past.‘412

As Kathleen Parthé has noted, ‗Time, forward!‘ became ‗Time, backward!‘ in the search for a new ideal.413

These broader developments form the common background to the orientation towards the past in dissident nationalist debate and in village prose.414

However one chooses to view the link between village prose and Russian nationalism, it is without doubt that village prose, and Rasputin‘s career with it, unfolded against the background of and in dialogue with the rediscovered Slavophile ideas of Russian nationhood. In the case of Rasputin, this is reflected in his growing political involvement which followed the trajectory of the increasingly open debate on national issues from the late 1970s. Thus, in the period following the publication of Proshchanie s Materoi in 1976, articles and ocherki on a wide range of social, political and ecological issues became an ever more dominant part of Rasputin‘s writing. Indeed, for a period of nine years after the publication of Pozhar in 1985, Rasputin devoted himself entirely to journalism. This was also the period of his direct

411

See Kathleen Parthé‘s discussion of the different positions taken: Parthé, ‗Russian Village Prose in Paraliterary Space‘, pp. 225-41.

412 _{O‘Connor, Intellectuals and Apparatchiks, p. 49.} 413

Parthé, Russian Village Prose, pp. 48-49.

414 _{Hasenkamp argues that the loss of the ruling ideology‘s credibility and the resulting}

‗spiritual vacuum‘ directly influenced village prose writers‘ emphasis on a collective moral code. Hasenkamp, Gedächtnis und Leben, p. 230.

participation in the political process. He was elected a people‘s deputy through the Writers‘ Union in 1989,415

appointed a member of Gorbachev‘s Presidential Council in 1990416 and was involved in a number of cultural and political groups of nationalist orientation.417 Rasputin‘s political activism has had a decisive and apparently irreversible effect on the critical reception of his fiction, which is for the most part interpreted through a political prism. This is certainly the case for the stories and one povest‟ he has written since his withdrawal from politics in 1994, but it also affects fiction written prior to his political period. Kathleen Parthé argues that as village prose entered what she calls ‗paraliterary space‘, older village prose texts were ‗re-labelled‘ without being ‗re-read‘. Village prose as a whole is reinterpreted as a ‗Soviet literature of compromise, if not collaboration, […] a proto-chauvinist, even proto-fascist Russian literature‘.418

This chapter is an elucidation of the way in which the Slavophile notion of the tselostnost‟ of existence seems to have influenced Rasputin‘s worldview as expressed in both his stories and his articles. While it is neither a reading nor a re-reading of Rasputin‘s fiction as ‗nationalist‘, the concept of ‗nation‘ is important to the following discussion. It will be argued that from the late 1970s, the idea of nation becomes increasingly bound up with the ‗obraz edinogo mira‘ and the theme of memory in Rasputin‘s writing. The first section of this chapter looks at the expression of a tselostnyi worldview sustained by memory in Rasputin‘s stories from the period 1966-1976, with particular reference to

Proshchanie s Materoi (1976). The second section is focused on Rasputin‘s publitsistika from the period 1977-1986 and his povest‟ Pozhar (1985). It

explores how in these writings the gentler vision of a vanishing world found in

Proshchanie s Materoi is replaced by a more morally charged portrayal of a

world which has ‗fallen‘ from an ideal whole, expressed in terms of a disintegrating society fraught with problems. Finally, the third section is based

415

O‘Connor, Intellectuals and Apparatchiks, p. 145.

416 _{Duncan, Russian Messianism, p. 124.} 417 _{Ibid., pp. 121-22 and p. 132.}

primarily on Rasputin‘s non-fiction during the period 1986-2002. It examines how both memory and the ideal of tselostnost‟ become central to the conception of Russian culture, history and literature which Rasputin developed in his articles of this period.

I The vanishing of a whole world: Rasputin’s povesti (1966-1976)

Proshchanie s Materoi (1976) is without doubt Rasputin‘s most clearly

articulated vision of the loss of a traditional way of life at the hands of an impatient new society. In its focus on the planned flooding of the island of Matera to make way for a hydroelectric power station, the plot literalises the idea of a vanishing world: Matera disappears under the waters of the Angara like the mythical city of Kitezh into Lake Svetloiar. This concern with the loss of the past and its values first appears in his short story ‗Ekh, starukha‘ (1966) and is a feature of all four of the povesti he wrote during this period: Den‟gi

dlia Marii (1967), Poslednii srok (1970), Zhivi i pomni (1974) and Proshchanie s Materoi (1976). The following is an analysis of how, in Rasputin‘s stories of

this period, the theme of memory expresses this concern in two particular ways. In the first place, memory is central to the concept of the unity of human existence over time, which is evoked as the ideal. Memory, conceived of as a moral imperative, appears as the means to preserve this continuity. Secondly, memory as a morally-charged concept plays a significant structural role in Rasputin‘s writing, shaping both the characters and the places of his stories. The unity of existence: Rasputin‘s ‗neskonchaemaia tsep‘‘

In his story ‗Ekh, starukha‘, Rasputin describes the thoughts of an old shaman woman who is unafraid of her approaching death, for her daughter and granddaughter are proof that she has fulfilled her duty: ‗Ee rod prodolzhaetsia i budet prodolzhat‘sia – ona v etoi tsepi byla nadezhnym zvenom, k kotoromu

prikreplialis‘ drugie zven‘ia‘.419

At the same time, she is tormented by the fact that she has not passed on the ancient art of shamanism which she inherited from her ancestors:

Человек, заканчивающий свой род, несчастен. Но человек, который похитил у своего народа его старинное достояние и унес его с собой в землю, никому не сказав, - как назвать этого человека?420

This passage encompasses all the main ideas which inform and frame the worldview which Rasputin expresses in his prose of this period. The metaphor of a chain, in which each person‘s life forms a link, is used to evoke the idea of the eternal unity of existence, in which past, present and future are firmly linked together. The story also introduces the idea of the individual‘s duty to bind past to future through a continuation of both their own rod in terms of an uninterrupted blood line, and the heritage of their cultural traditions and values. Conversely, the failure to be a ‗reliable link‘ in this chain appears as a shameful betrayal of the past.

The motif of the ‗neskonchaemaia tsep‘‘ of existence, and the connected concern with the continuation of one‘s rod figure in both Poslednii srok and

Zhivi i pomni.421 It is in Proshchanie s Materoi, however, that these ideas are more fully elaborated by Rasputin and moved to the centre of the narrative. Indeed, the story‘s plot hinges on Dar‘ia‘s fear of the abandoning of the family graves to the flood waters, thus destroying the continuity with the past. Through the character of Dar‘ia, Rasputin evokes in detail the perception of a life lived as one small link in an eternal chain. Looking at her son and grandson, she sees ‗odna nitochka s uzelkami‘422

, and when she imagines the day of her death, she sees an endless stream of her ancestors ready to judge her for her actions:

Ей казалось, что она хорошо видит их, стоящих огромным, клином расходящимся строем, которому нет конца, [...]. И на острие этого

419

Valentin Rasputin, ‗Ekh, starukha‘, in Valentin Rasputin, Krai vozle samogo neba: Ocherki i

rasskazy, Irkutsk, 1966, pp. 53-58 (p. 54). 420 _{Rasputin, ‗Ekh, starukha‘, p. 54.} 421

See, for example: Valentin Rasputin, ‗Poslednii srok‘, in Rasputin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, i, pp. 256-414 (p. 387); and Valentin Rasputin, ‗Zhivi i pomni‘, in Rasputin, Izbrannye

proizvedeniia, ii, pp. 7-200 (p. 80).

многовекового клина, чуть отступив, чтобы лучше ее было видно, лицом к нему одна она.423

In Dar‘ia‘s perception of the world, these ancestors are as real as the living, and certainly as linked to the future. In tending to their graves, she calls them all by name, remembering her father‘s instruction that she must go on living ‗chtob pokrepche zatsepit‘ nas s belym svetom, zanozit‘ v nem, chto my byli‘.424

The traditional duty to remember the dead appears here as a duty to ensure their immortality. For this the dead depend on the living, and, in the voices Dar‘ia hears at the graveyard, demand their due: ‗A golosa, vse gromche, vse neterpelivei i iarostnei… Oni sprashivaiut o nadezhde, oni govoriat, chto ona,