1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910817099903321

Autore

Parthé Kathleen

Titolo

Russian village prose : the radiant past / / Kathleen F. Parthé

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, N.J. : , : Princeton University Press, , 1992

ISBN

1-4008-0609-7

9786612751592

1-282-75159-X

1-4008-2075-8

1-4008-1294-1

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (213 pages)

Collana

Princeton paperbacks

Disciplina

891.73/4409321734

Soggetti

Russian fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

Country life in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [149]-187) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION -- ONE. The Parameters of Village Prose -- TWO. The Question of Genre -- THREE. The Poetics of Village Prose -- FOUR. Time, Backward! -- FIVE. Borrowed Time: Metaphors for Loss in Village Prose -- SIX. The Village Prose Writers and Their Critics -- SEVEN. Two Detectives in Search of Village Prose -- EIGHT. Rewriting and Rereading Literary History -- Appendix I. "Kondyr" / Leonov, Aleksei -- Appendix II. "Kondyr": A Parametric Analysis -- NOTES -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

Kathleen Parth offers the first comprehensive examination of the controversial literary movement Russian Village Prose. From the 1950's to the decline of the movement in the 1970's, Valentin Rasputin, Fedor Abramov, and other writers drew on "luminous" memories of their rural childhoods to evoke a thousand-year-old pattern of life that was disappearing as they wrote. In their lyrical descriptions of a vanishing world, they expressed nostalgia for Russia's past and fears for the nation's future; they opposed collectivized agriculture, and fought to preserve traditional art and architecture and to protect the environment. Assessing the place of Village Prose in the newly revised



canon of twentieth-century Russian literature, Parth maintains that these writers consciously ignored and undermined Socialist Realism, and created the most aesthetically coherent and ideologically important body of published writings to appear in the Soviet Union between Stalin's death and Gorbachev's ascendancy. In the 1970's, Village Prose was seen as moderately nationalist and conservative in spirit. After 1985, however, statements by several of its practitioners caused the movement to be reread as a possible stimulus for chauvinistic, anti-Semitic groups like Pamyat. This important development is treated here with a thorough discussion of all the political implications of these rural narratives. Nevertheless, the center of Parth's work remains her exploration of the parameters that constitute a "code of reading" for works of Village Prose. The appendixes contain a translation and analysis of a particularly fine example of Russian Village Prose--Aleksei Leonov's "Kondyr."