seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from Belgium
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from Poland
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
Valentin Rasputin in Priangar’e was perceived as an uncannily influential figure. When he was alive, villagers evoked Rasputin as an authority capable of going to Moscow, talking to Putin, an…
The writings of Vasilina Orlova are well worth reading. They often reflect her fieldwork and family ties to a village, Anosovo, in the vicinity of the Bratsk Dam, a massive postwar electrification project in the former Soviet Union.
Valentin Rasputin in Priangar’e was perceived as an uncannily influential figure. When he was alive, villagers evoked Rasputin as an authority capable of going to Moscow, talking to Putin, an…
The village of Anosovo sprung to life on the wave of Soviet industrialization. The Bratsk hydroelectric station and a massive dam flooded vast territories and displaced almost two hundred fifty set…
Writer
Since his death in 2015, Valentin Rasputin, always respected by Siberians, went through metamorphosis as a figure in public imaginary. I wonder if I could speak about "public imaginary" here, just how much is it public? In the absence of any shared means of communication, apart from mass media, which are concerned with urban centers and which news from Anosovo do not reach unless it is news of a particularly spectacular devastation, public imaginary emerges out of small exchanges, most remarkably on the moor from where the ferry departs and to which it arrives. Public imaginary forms through rumors and hearsay; in things that get repeated and that do not; it is simultaneously undetectable and undeniable; evident in everything and hard to pin down.
Siberians loved Rasputin always: he was the first to recognize and express the tragedy through which they lived. He opened their eyes to the tragedy of dislocation and dispossession, which, albeit experienced by everyone and lived intensely by everyone, was not perhaps perceived as tragedy by many. Siberians are remarkably resilient, not to say indifferent, to every new turn of misfortune and injustice which befalls them.
When Rasputin was alive, he represented simultaneously the figure of a patriarchal sage, admired and respected, and a compatriot, co-villager, someone with whom one was connected through a blood or family relation, in other words, someone who could not truly be different from us, and therefore is perceived not altogether without irony. One of the co-villagers recalled how "Valka" ran the streets: "I remember Valka: nose running, short pants na pomochakh" (on galluses; for kids at the time, hand-made as a rule, and consisting of one or two stripe across the shoulder). Thus the speaker contrasted the image of a common village boy with a writer of all-Russian prominence, as Valentin Rasputin had long been widely acknowledged.
Another telling example of such irony requires some preliminary information. In 2013, climbing the wild cold boiling of the Lena River up in a boat-ploskodonka with an engine, both engine and the bottom of the boat scratching the sharp rocks, expecting every minute that something would be broken and my companions and I would be stuck on the bank, I reached the headstream. Siberian eccentric Valentin Trapeznikov and his wife, whose name my memory regretfully does not retain, lived there on zaimka (a type of isolated small settlement). He was accepting there theoretical guests and tourists--several houses he built himself were standing empty--showing them around, providing them with taiga experience, and also gathering a number of miscellaneous collections which a small museum comprised: he was interested in enigmas of nature and Slavic soul, antiquities of all kinds, Siberian gems, cosmonautics and aviation (he even bought the house where a famous aviator was born, and kept it as a hall of his; also, he had a number of taxidermist works on the territory. He told me that Rasputin was at this zaimka: the writer climbed a fence, came to one of the starozhili (old-timers)"to talk" and received the response: "I have no time to talk talks right now, can't you see I am scything?" With that, Rasputin had to climb the fence back.
The irony, however respectful, towards Rasputin, dissipated with his death. In public imaginary, Rasputin turned on acquiring the tinges of the spirit of the place, someone who possessed next to supranatural powers while alive. He is spoken of as if he is still invisibly present, and people understand that the cause of his life -- to protect and make these spaces prosperous -- is lost.
Yesterday, I overheard a fisherman near a campfire telling another (evidently meaning me as an addressee as well): "Once Rasputin was getting back home, in the village of Atalanka, and saw those here who cut the forest" -- he gestured widely over the damaged hills, where predatory exploitation and cutting out of trees left scars which would not heal in decades -- "Rasputin frightened (shuganul) ministers, and then those went away. Now he is dead, and the village of Atalanka fell into decrepitude (prishla v upadok)."
The mythical nature of this evidence is such that it places Rasputin in a position of a near-all-powerful agent, who could forbid the cutting off of forest and provide livelihood for the village where he had spent his childhood, which in truth deteriorated during his lifetime, on his eyes, of which the fisherman knew perfectly well. Apart from an understandable disposition to impress and perhaps slightly mock the anthropologist--who must have known very little about the life of the community--what guided the creation of this story, was the enchanted figure of Rasputin himself--a rare genius of Russian letters coming from these places.
Guarantee a shiftless man another life after his first, he still won't learn how to live.
Valentin Rasputin
Revered Russian writer Valentin Rasputin dies at age 77
MOSCOW (AP) — Valentin Rasputin, a revered Russian writer who was a prominent member of a literary movement in the 1960s and 1970s known as Village Prose that focused on peasants in the Soviet Union, has died. He was 77. http://dlvr.it/91Fr9c
