Siberia, Siberia - Hardcover

Rasputin, Valentin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810112876 ISBN 13: 9780810112872

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Valentin Rasputin—one of the most gifted and influential Russian prose writers of the past thirty years—offers a sweeping account of and penetrating reflection on the Russians' four hundred years of experience in Siberia. Beginning with Yermak, whose Cossacks crossed into Siberia in the 1580s, through the rapid Russian exploration, conquest, and colonialization, to today, Rasputin reveals the peculiarities of the Siberians, studying the gap between dreams and reality that has plagued Russians in Siberia for centuries.

About this title

About the Author

VALENTIN RASPUTIN (1937–2015) was a patriarch of the so-called village prose writers who emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1960s to address moral and environmental issues and depict the remains of a rural Russia about to be consumed by industrialization. Among his best-selling works is the 1976 novel Farewell to Matyora (Northwestern University Press, 1995) about an island village on the Angara River that is about to be subsumed in the 1960s by construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric plant and the elderly residents who resist resettlement. He served in the Congress of People’s Deputies from 1989 to 1990.

Reviews

This lyrical meditation on Siberia by one of Russia's best- known contemporary novelists (Live and Remember, 1978, etc.) mingles the spiritual and historical for a portrait of its hero- -Siberia itself. July 1996 is a timely publication date for the English translation of Rasputin's tribute to Siberia. Now that the Cold War is over, the time has come for Americans to put aside narrow images of Siberia as the home of labor camps and endless iciness. In his exceedingly romantic, even spiritual essay, this native son presents a multifaceted portrait of his homeland, offering reflections on subjects as wide-ranging as architecture, history, geography, ecology, and anthropology. Connecting it all is Rasputin's deeply felt Siberian patriotism and his environmentalism, both of which contain clear moral and spiritual dimensions. He decries ``Russia's practice of squeezing out and hauling off all the best in Siberia while dumping its worst there, including human rejects,'' and brings a fresh perspective to the current debates on colonialism. The environmental devastation of his homeland, especially of the incomparable Lake Baikal, plays a pivotal role in Rasputin's activism directed at repairing the damages caused by years of Soviet rule. Indeed, Rasputin's tale of the destruction of Siberia's natural beauty by countless dams and factories is a parable for the fate of Russia itself. He writes: ``Maybe nature stands between God and human beings. And until you unite with nature, you won't move forward. It won't let you.'' With a melodramatic religious fervor for national salvation that echoes Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Siberia, Siberia vividly admonishes Russians to return to a purer relationship with their own history and natural surroundings, and it holds up Siberia as the image of both Russia's past sins and her potential redemption. (16 photos, 2 maps) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Rasputin is best known in this country for short fiction set in his native Siberia, most recently his 1985 novella, The Fire. Since then, he has devoted himself to a genre that Winchell and Mikkelson define in their excellent introduction as "the category of social commentary and polemics known in Russia by the untranslatable world publitsistika." In curious contrast to the devastating political subtlety of Russian fiction, publitsistika can be discomfittingly zealous. Not that Western readers will take any exception to Rasputin's cause: Siberia is in danger of losing, he says, its enormously fertile environment, its monuments and even its spirit. He traces that spirit back to the misty 16th-century history of Cossacks and of the more legendary Novogorod freemen who fled Ivan the Terrible for the chilly reaches of Siberia. Rasputin describes a procession of freedom seekers from Old Believers to Decembrists filing into a landscape that is equally untamed (one river he says was "born freely and living freely"), but he manages almost entirely to avoid Soviet-era political prisoners. On the other hand, he's perfectly willing to take the government to task for its many outrageous environmental depredations. It's the bureaucratic callousness of the exploitation that's so chilling. In one case, Rasputin recalls visiting what had been one of the last great tracts of Siberian pine. "As we were hiking down to the clear-cut zones, we came across a sign nailed to one of the surviving pine trees. Its inscription read: 'Welcome to a restful outing in the woods. While enjoying the woods, do not break off or cut down any bushes or trees: protect the birds and animals and do not destroy their nesting places.'"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A respected contemporary novelist whose translated works include Farewell to Matyora (Northwestern Univ., 1991), Raspurtin here ventures to give an overview of a part of the world whose very name "has long sounded like a warning bell announcing something vaguely powerful and imminent." Indeed, since its frozen wastes have long served as a dumping ground for political prisoners of all persuasions, it hardly seems like an alluring place to visit. Yet Siberia has its own rich heritage, which Rasputin enthusiastically outlines. This is not a travel guide or popular history but a detailed, scholarly treatment of a vast territory that carefully documents its history as it moves region by region through it. The writing is not as mellifluous as one might expect of a novelist, but here Rasputin is a man with a serious purpose: to place in carefully reconstructed time and space an area that has seemed infinite. For academic libraries.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The acclaimed Russian author Valentin Rasputin provides a fascinating historical account of Siberia. While most Westerners think of Siberia as a frozen wasteland, Rasputin's book casts this vast, peculiar, and harsh land in a different light, describing its breathtaking natural beauty and pristine wilderness. Exulting in Siberia's solitude and excess of natural resources, he warns against uncontrolled exploitation of its riches and decries the greed that causes the plundering. He also provides a chronology of events that have shaped this land, starting with the initial settlement of Siberia by the Cossacks and the peasants who followed them, through the history of tyrannical rulers from Russia and later the Soviet Union, up to current times and the rise of Siberian nationalism. While Siberia never became independent of Russia, it was never wholly integrated, either; and Rasputin isn't sure independence is the way to go, explaining that Siberia is now an important and central part of Russia. Appealing to both casual readers and those specifically interested in Russian history. Kathleen Hughes

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810112876
• ISBN 13: 9780810112872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 438