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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Parthé, Kathleen.

Series:

Princeton paperbacks.

Princeton paperbacks

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Russian fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Russian fiction.

Country life in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (213 pages)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1992.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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."

Contents:

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

Notes:

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

Description based upon print version of record.

ISBN:

9786612751592

9781400806089

1400806089

9781400806096

1400806097

9781282751590

128275159X

9781400820757

1400820758

9781400812943

1400812941

OCLC:

707068790