Valentin Rasputin died

Obituary

On March 14, the famous country writer Valentin Rasputin died in a Moscow hospital. He did not live one day before his 78th birthday.

The work of Valentin Rasputin is a rather rare phenomenon today: its significance is recognized even by those who perceive his ideological views as absolutely hostile.

It was very easy to relate to the writer’s views, to have some opinion about them, because he expressed them firmly and clearly: he consistently signed “anti-democratic” letters (from a letter condemning the Ogonyok magazine in 1989 to an appeal in support of criminal prosecution Pussy Riot in 2012) and gave harsh interviews (for example, calling for everyone “who doesn’t love her” to be expelled from Russia). To some extent, Rasputin’s worldview can be reduced to the now quite popular triumvirate “Stalin, Orthodoxy, Nationality” (commitment to Stalin distinguished Rasputin from those villagers who could not forgive the leader for the atrocities of collectivization). But despite the fact that today the aesthetic tastes of many are ruled by ideology, the attitude towards Rasputin even among his ideological opponents remains complex. You can’t just erase the impression that “Live and Remember” and “Farewell to Matera” once made.

Viktor Grigorievich Rasputin was born on March 15, 1937 in the East Siberian village of Atalanka (later, during the construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station, this village fell into the flood zone). After school, he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of Irkutsk University, then worked as a correspondent for local newspapers. In 1966, his story “Money for Maria” was published in the Irkutsk almanac “Angara” - about how the husband of a saleswoman in a village store is looking for money to cover a shortage that accidentally arises for her. Two years later, it was published as a separate book by the Moscow publishing house "Young Guard", and this moment can be considered the beginning of Rasputin's real fame.

Rasputin's prose can be fit into two traditions. In Russian classical literature, Rasputin’s works, burying the Siberian village with all its originality, with its family and community values, clearly (and by the conscious will of the author) inherit, for example, Bunin’s “Village”, burying the landowner way of life, and some texts by Tolstoy and Chekhov . At the same time, it is interesting that such a pathos of mourning the old world (in “Farewell to Matera” he literally goes under water), as well as a creative mastery of the very cataclysm of the change of “human formations” are inherent - albeit not in such a concentrated form as in Rasputin, - to American authors who wrote several decades before him, to those with whom he did not associate himself. We are talking about those writers who survived the Great Depression and captured the changing face of America, such as Steinbeck and, to some extent, Faulkner.

Fitting, even just for oneself, speculatively, Rasputin’s prose into such an international context is a completely productive activity. And this should be done not in order to compare “levels,” but in order to understand: this writer, incredibly focused on Russia, its uniqueness and individuality, saw and felt things that were completely universal to mankind. And simply the main ones.

Anna Narinskaya

Seeker of universal human soil