Siberia, Siberia

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.

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.