Translated material
"Man is getting shorter"
Valentin Rasputin about Platonov, popular worship and a failed meeting with the brownie
March 15 marks the 80th anniversary of the birth of the writer Valentin Rasputin (1937-2015). For the column “Instructions for Survival,” where ideas and advice from writers are published to resolve existential questions and everyday troubles, “Gorky” selected his thoughts on the death of the Russian village, the colonization of Siberia and grace.About me
— I don’t like to fantasize; I use the writer’s right to fiction only for amendments that clear the moral currents of reality when transferring it into a book.
“If I had three lives and wrote ten times faster (and I always wrote slowly), then even then I wouldn’t be able to half choose the destinies that took shape only in our one village, quiet, unnoticeable before moving, half asleep.
“I read from Shukshin that when he got to Moscow, he bit his common words, trying to speak in a city manner. The same thing happened to me at Irkutsk University. Why - after all, I have now studied Homer and Shakespeare! It was necessary to conform to philological bearing, not to show oneself as a bast shoe. The language taken out of the village, of course, needed enrichment... But enrichment, not replacement. I had no idea what kind of wealth I had, pushing it deeper and happily calling it all sorts of “equivalents” and “existentialisms.” And even when I began to write, I began to write pretentiously, unnaturally. I try not to remember my very first experiences; Hemingway, Remarque, and Borchert were there.
“I left the village without meeting a brownie, a goblin, a bannushka, or a mermaid, but when I wrote “Farewell to Matera,” I could not do without the owner of the island. This is not a tribute to paganism, but a tribute to poetry, without which the people could not live.
About nature
— My first impressions are connected with Angara, then with my mother and grandmother. I understand that it should be the other way around, because it wasn’t Angara who gave me breast milk, but no matter how much I excavate within myself, I don’t find anything before Angara. Probably, my mother’s presence was so natural and necessary, the fusion was so complete, that I did not separate myself from her. Angara struck me with its magical beauty and power, I did not understand that this is nature, existing independently of humans for millions of years, it seemed to me that it was she who brought us here, arranged the huts in a certain order and populated them with families. This idea could be connected with the picture of the overflowing Angara, which flooded the village through which we children floated on rafts, and a cow carried along the rapids on some platform; I can still hear someone’s voice: “Mother Angara brought this to the poor children.”
- In my youth, even then looking for solitude, I started a house in the port of Baikal in one room with a kitchenette, the life in which for several years I now remember as the best, in my opinion, made from everything that then fell out in many searches and household clothes. I especially loved October there, when both the guest and the tourist disappear, the local people calm down under the stingy warmth and in the last pre-winter labors, general peace and forgiveness sets in in the world, and when every response, every sound in the spacious horizons is heard with a melodious bell-like resonance. In October, Baikal often rocks, the waves crash against the shore, shaking it like the side of a ship, and a driving whistle circles over the sea, but often in October there is such calm and smoothness and God's grace, such a sad-happy languor takes possession of both the abyss and the firmament, that you are ready to turn even into stone, but to be, to be in her dying breath. On still warm and soft, gift-giving evenings, I loved to see off the sun, go far along the rails of the old Circum-Baikal Road, to where there is not a single human soul, sit for a long time on the shore, completely forgetting myself, and then climb up the mountain, and higher, and there, too, to freeze in bliss, wanting nothing, nothing more in the world, except to breathe in and look at least to infinity at the grace spread out below.
About literature
— In order to restore trust in literature (and this had to be done after the revolution of 1917), it is necessary to write in such a way that it is impossible not to read, just as it was impossible not to read “Quiet Don.”
— I am sure: a writer begins in childhood from the impressions with which he is imbued precisely then. He may then not know himself as a writer for a long time, or he may never know, but the soul is sown, fertilized, and if directed towards it, it is capable of yielding a harvest at any moment.
- After the war, literature managed to bow to the warrior, the defender of the Fatherland, and even later it found suitable feelings and language to bow to the old people, the guardians of folk traditions and language, faith and conscience, who carried Russia out of hunger and cold on their shoulders in unspeakable torment and disorder, but literature bowed to them already from the edge of the grave into which the Russian village was sinking.
- Two forces - native faith and native literature - spiritually formed the Russian person, gave him scale and inspired him. Such influence and such significance of literature cannot be seen in any other people.
About the writers
- In essence, everything in him (Dostoevsky), with the exception of two or three political articles in the Diary, is said forever, and an official entering the civil service should be examined whether he read Dostoevsky and what he took from Dostoevsky.
- The high-born Tolstoy, born a count and who perfectly knew and described the high society, as if in his youth, preparing for his work as a writer, walked his entire family path in the opposite direction to its source, walked on foot through peasant Rus' from Count Tolstoy and Prince Bolkonsky to some some guy Akim and Platon Karataev.
— Nowadays it is customary to love Platonov, to consider him the most modern writer. It is, indeed, modern. But it is modern for all times, it was so in the 20s and 40s, it is modern now and, there is no doubt, it will be modern in the future. Because its main and all-encompassing theme is grief for the world and man.
- “Be a man”... Everything that Shukshin did in art was consecrated by him with this demanding concept, this passion and this pain, to which he forced everyone to listen - who knows how to listen and who does not know how to listen. In recent decades, we have not had another artist who would so confidently and mercilessly break into every human soul and invite it to check what it is, in what spaces and distances it got lost, what temptation it succumbed to, or, on the contrary, what helped it to endure and remain faithful and pure.
About Siberia
- For us, for those who were born and live in Siberia, this is a homeland, dearer and closer to which there is nothing in the world, which, like any other homeland, needs love and protection - needing, perhaps, more protection than any other side, because there is still something to protect. And what scares others in Siberia is not only familiar to us, but also necessary: it’s easier for us to breathe if there’s frost in winter, rather than dripping; we feel peace, not fear, in the untouched, wild taiga; Immeasurable expanses and mighty rivers have shaped our free, restive soul.
— Speaking about the character of the Russian Siberian, it is worth repeating that from the very beginning he was shaped by the people's freemen. The colonization of Siberia was, first of all, popular, and before those whom the government sent “by choice” and “by decree,” detachments of “free-hunters” made their way here. People came to Siberia, escaping restrictions and oppression and seeking freedom of all kinds - religious, social, moral, business and personal. Those who were at odds with the law moved here in order to hide in the Trans-Ural depths from punishment, and those who were looking for a fair community law that would resist administrative oppression, and those who dreamed of a side street where there would be no laws.
About modernity
- We are forgetting how to read. We no longer know how to read either “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” or legends, or epics. A person becomes shorter and shorter and, as a rule, fits spiritually only into the period of time in which he lives, without stretching out to the full length of his national existence.
- Now, when for many reasons the language is becoming shallow and empty of the Russian word, now especially folklore records for us also have enormous value because they convey living folk speech.
- The epic is a thing of the past; It seems that we are witnessing the last generation, finishing singing (not on the radio) a folk song and finishing an oral tale. All that remains is the proverb, without which, fortunately, the Russian person seems unable to exist. The anecdote blossomed like thistles. We have entered a new era of mass poetry, fun and pleasure.
About the people
“Worship of the people is also a Russian trait, but the cold and soulless deification of the people has never added anything comforting to their fate.
“In their long and complex destiny, a people inevitably goes through illness, doubts and trials, and all this, in a certain sense, can even contribute to its moral purification and civic excitement.
- Folklore reveals the people's soul more and more fully than anything else... He sang, cried and expressed his fate, predicted and made wishes for it, set forth hopes, the fulfillment of which he deserved, and immediately began to be ironic at himself: no, he will never wait for their fulfillment... It is not thinkers who foresee the future paths of their people, but the people themselves; thinkers can only find these revelations in their multivocally expressed soul and recognize their figurative language.
“We all must have come out as peasants at some point.”