|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Living on Borrowed Time: Literature From the Russian Countryside
| Article
# : |
15886 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1989 |
8,135 Words |
| Author
: |
Kathleen Parthe
Kathleen Parthe, assistant professor of Russian at the
University of Rochester, has traveled extensively in the
Soviet Union. Her specialty is Russian literature in the
Soviet period. She is currently completing a book called
Borrowed Time: Russian Village from Ovechkin to Rasputin.
Parthe has published a number of articles on the works of Leo
Tolstoy and is the editor of the Tolstoy Studies Journal. |
A sense of urgency has propelled Russian literature through the twentieth century. While some writers pushed time forward to a utopian future, many other writers saw themselves as witnesses to a past that without their literary efforts would face the oblivion of an Orwellian "memory-hole." Vladmir Nabokov fondly recalled a privileged, pre-revolutionary childhood. Osip Mandelshtam's poetry resurrected the Petersburg of his youth, which had vanished forever in 1917. Boris Pasternak described exciting days of revolution followed by the confusion and doubts of the civil war years. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remembered Soviet prisons from the inside, while Anna Akhmatova told the story of a prisoner's mother who had stood outside the prison walls fro seventeen months. Accurate and moving accounts of the past were written, but until the Gorbachev reforms, very few were published in the Soviet Union. The only major exception to this rule is Russian village prose.
Russian village prose is a large body of memory-driven witness literature written since Stalin's death in 1953 by people who grew up in rural Russia, but who left the villages for the army, higher education and, eventually, for a literary career. From the vantage point of the city, they see a thousand-year-old way of life rapidly disappearing, and they seek to record and to some extent slow down its passing in their works. What they write of is not the memory of privilege or prison, but of the ancient daily pattern of peasant life as it intersects with the forces of nature and history. The tone is nostalgic--mostly luminous, but frequently bitter as well.
Nostalgia, as Fred Davis points out in Yearning for Yesterday, is the reconstruction of the essence of what is basically a "personally experienced past." In a traditional rural setting, though, what a person knows is intertwined with a collective folk memory. To this already expanded personal past, the village prose writers add literary memory, reviving a Russian literary tradition from the previous century, the theme of the decline of rural life. Between the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the Revolution, the gentry estate was the most important rural setting for writers, and its gradual decline was used to symbolize a general malaise. The death of the estate and the way of life it represented is announced first, tentatively, in Gonchaov's Oblomov and Turgenev's Faters and Sons, and then, decisively, in Chekhov, especially in The Cherry Orchard. At the end of Chekhov's first act, the shepherd playing a reed pipe in the distance is a teasing reminder of the pastoral life that is no more. The haunting sounds of a breaking string and of an axe striking the cherry trees punctuate the tension of
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
