Country writers and their works. Writers-"hillbillies": was the opportunity missed? Vasily Belov. "Business as usual"

Kochergin's stories are straightforward, the lines of his prose are harmonious, but life path the writer, on the contrary, is very tortuous. He was born and studied in the capital, then went to Siberia, where he wrote his “Altai Stories”, which received several awards. literary prizes- including the Moscow Government Prize.

- Pride Soviet literature: Vasily Belov, Valentin Rasputin, Victor Astafiev...Which of the so-called country writers are you closest to?

I think that Astafiev - perhaps precisely because he was somewhat broader than his fellow writers.

At the age of 15–16, I was literally engrossed in his “Tsar Fish” and it was because of this book that I began to dream of going to the Yenisei someday.

- As children, we are all romantics. But it seems that the village writers had a very clear adult goal - to save the village from dying. And, alas, they failed...

But it seems to me that they already understood that nothing could be saved. Their literature was the literature of farewell and an attempt to live this farewell: just look at the titles - “Farewell to Matera”, “ Last bow", "The Last Sorrow". In Russia, this happens very often: something grandiose happens that is comprehended not at the state level, but at the literary level.

- There is a feeling that this understanding was quite idealistic.

Belov, Rasputin, Astafiev, Shukshin - they were all idealists. That is why, thanks to them, the myth of the village as a powerful ideal world, on which you can lean and in which it would be good to return to fall to the roots. Although even at that time there was nothing particularly useful there.

- Why was this world so interesting to urban readers?

Because he was completely unfamiliar to them - just like, say, the worlds of the Strugatsky brothers or Alexandre Dumas. The unknown always attracts.

However, the world of Dumas and the Strugatskys excites many generations, while the world of the villagers today is of little interest to anyone.

There has been a fashion for it, yes. But the village writers themselves were partly to blame for this; during perestroika, they compromised their world with almost Black Hundred statements. And, besides, everyone knows what’s happening to the village.

- Do you think she's dying?

Yes. Although they still live in the village wonderful people. In the village in Ryazan region where I built a house, there is a farmer, Vitya Nazarov.

A strong family, wonderful children and grandchildren who are already helping him. He plows the gardens of the entire village, does not refuse to help in anything, I don’t know when he manages to sleep. His income is low, but as a matter of principle, he does not treat his fields with pesticides: “I don’t want to poison, this is our land.” Much of the village rests on such stubborn people.

Village prose a long time ago, alas, it remained in history. She's gone. There are authors who write on the theme of the village - Boris Ekimov, Roman Senchin, Dmitry Novikov from Petrozavodsk, who creates wonderful “northern” prose. But these are all works of a completely different genre. I am a person myself, born in the center of Moscow, a villager by a very stretch.

- Well, who are you?

I am a person who settled in a village in a place where Finno-Ugrians once lived, and before that representatives of some unexplored culture of the Middle Oka burial grounds.

I write prose, teach my son, and try to travel around the country more, if there is time and opportunity. What else? I worked as a janitor, cleaner, postman, watchman. At one time he went to Siberia, where he was a forester in a nature reserve.

- For what?

My parents dreamed that I would follow in their footsteps and become a chemical engineer, and I tried to find my way. And I'm not the only one! In 1990, when I sent letters to all the reserves of the Union asking for a job, there were no vacancies anywhere. Only with Gorny Altai I received an answer that there is a bid. All states were filled with romantics from large cities. In the taiga huts there were collections of French poetry, thick literary magazines...

Apparently, there is a constant flow of not only an influx into the cities, but also a reverse movement. Look at a bright representative- the wonderful writer Mikhail Tarkovsky, nephew of Andrei Tarkovsky, has been living for more than thirty years in the village of Bakhta on the Yenisei and works as a commercial hunter.

- Well, how did it seem to you, a Muscovite, there in Siberia?

There was taiga romance, new beautiful spaces. Life in the “bear corner”, on the cordon, where there is no electricity, where all food is delivered by pack horses. Although now I think that the most interesting thing was not this at all, but the opportunity to come into contact with a completely different life, with a different culture, to look at Moscow from a different point of view.

- Did you learn a lot there?

Still would! To milk the cows and bake bread—food was brought to us only twice a year. And also - writing long letters to his wife, thanks to which he eventually became a writer.

DIRECT SPEECH

Igor Shaitanov, critic, literary secretary of the Russian Booker Prize:

If in the 1960–1970s the works of villagers were published in huge numbers and caused great resonance, today they are quietly published in magazines like “Our Contemporary”. Their authors are not given prizes. But, interestingly, at the same time, writers who have nothing to do with the villagers, but simply write about the village - for example, Andrei Dmitriev with his novel “The Peasant and the Teenager” or Roman Senchin with “The Flood Zone” - receive these awards. Why? It's simple: in Soviet times, village literature was prose of the highest level.

And today... Well, you understand.

REFERENCE

Ilya Kochergin was born in Moscow on May 30, 1970. Studied at Moscow Art Institute named after. Mendeleev, at the Faculty of Geology of Moscow State University. He worked as a forester in the Altai Nature Reserve for four years. After returning to Moscow, he entered the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky.

Winner of the Moscow Government Prize in the field of literature for “Altai Stories”.

One of the most interesting phenomena of Russian literature XX century is rural prose. The largest representatives, “patriarchs” of the movement are considered to be F. Abramov, V. Belov, V. Rasputin. Among modern writers who continue the tradition of rustic prose, Roman Senchin and Mikhail Tarkovsky are named.

Our selection includes diverse works, but they are united common topic- the fate of the village and peasantry in XX century, the life of a collective farm village, and will be of interest to everyone who is interested in this topic.

Abramov, Fedor. Brothers and Sisters: A Novel. - Izhevsk: Udmurtia, 1979. - 240 p.

The first novel in a tetralogy with common name"Brothers and sisters". In the center of events is the story of the peasant family of the Pryaslins, residents of a northern Russian village. The time of the Great Patriotic War.

Abramov, Fedor. Two winters and three summers: a novel. - L.: Children's literature, 1986. - 320 p.

The second novel in the Brothers and Sisters tetralogy. Post-war time in the village.

Abramov, Fedor. Crossroads: a novel. – M.: Sovremennik, 1973. - 268 p.

The third novel in the Brothers and Sisters tetralogy. Six years after the end of the war.

Abramov, Fedor. Home: novel. – M.: Sovremennik, 1984. - 239 p.

The last novel in the Brothers and Sisters tetralogy. Events of the 1970s. Much has changed in Pekashin.

Aitmatov, Chingiz. Mother's field: stories. – Barnaul: Alt. book publishing house, 1982. – 208 p.

Wartime in the village. Difficult female share raise children without a husband. The fate of the wise Tolgonai.

Aitmatov, Chingiz. Early cranes: stories. - L.: Lenizdat, 1982. - 480 p.

Wartime in the village. The heroes of the story work on a collective farm and replace their fathers who went to the front.

Akulov, Ivan. Kasyan Ostudny: a novel. – M.: Sov. Russia, 1990. – 620 p.

Chronicle of the life of a small Trans-Ural village, 1928, Stalin’s “year of the great turning point”, collectivization.

Akulov, Ivan. Quick ending: stories. – M.: Sov. writer, 1989. – 384 p.

Love and village.

Alekseev, Mikhail. The Cherry Pool: a novel. – M.: Sov. writer, 1981. – 495 p.

Village in the 1930s.

Alekseev, Mikhail. Uncrying willow: a novel. – M.: Sov. Russia, 1988. – 528 p.

The village during the Great Patriotic War and the first post-war years. At the center of the novel is the life of a young woman, Fenya Ugryumova.

Alekseev, Sergey. Roy: a novel. – M.: Mol. Guard, 1988. – 384 p.

Siberian village of Stremyanka. Children and grandchildren of hereditary peasants are developing new lands. History of the Zavarzin family.

Antonov Sergey. Ravines; Vaska: stories. – M.: Izvestia, 1989. – 544 p.

The story “Ravines” covers the period of collectivization in a remote Saratov village.

Antonov Sergey. Poddubensky ditties; It was about Penkov: the story. – Perm: Perm. book publishing house, 1972. – 224 p.

From village life in the 1960s. Many stories have been filmed.

Astafiev, Victor. Last bow: a story. – M.: Mol. Guard, 1989.

An autobiographical story about rural childhood.

Babaevsky, Semyon. Filial rebellion: a novel. – M.: Sov. Russia, 1961. – 520 p.

Stavropol village after the Great Patriotic War.

Babaevsky, Semyon. Stanitsa: novel. – M.: Sov. writer, 1978. – 560 p.

Life in the Kuban village, radical changes in the countryside, the move of many collective farmers to the city.

Bashirov, Gumer. Seven springs: a novel. – M.: Sovremennik, 1986. – 398 p.

Tatarstan, life of a collective farm village in the 1970s, problems of nature protection.

Belov, Vasily. Eves: a chronicle of the 20s. – M.: Sovremennik, 1979. – 335 p.

Life and everyday life of a northern village on the eve of collectivization and during its implementation.

Borshchagovsky, Alexander. Selected works: in 2 volumes. T. 1: Milky Way: a novel; Stories; Sukhovey: a story. – M.: Khudozh. lit., 1982. – 548 p.

A novel about the feat of the collective farm peasantry in the first year of the Great Patriotic War.

Gladkov, Fedor. A story about childhood. – M.: Khudozh. literature, 1980. – 415 p.

Autobiographical book. A story about the life of a peasant boy, about the life of a pre-revolutionary Russian village.

Ekimov, Boris. Kholushino courtyard. – M.: Soviet writer, 1984. – 360 p.

Life and customs of the Cossacks. The title echoes A. Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryonin’s Dvor.” Polemic with Solzhenitsyn.

Zhukov, Anatoly. A house for a grandson: a novel. – M.: Sovremennik, 1977. – 461 p.

The village of Khmelevka, the life of collective farmers. Revolution, civil war, collectivization.

Village prose is one of the trends in Russian literature last century. It originated in the 50s. The works of representatives of this movement have been studied by schoolchildren in Russian literature classes for decades. Many stories and stories by "village" writers have been filmed by both Soviet and Russian filmmakers. The work of the brightest representatives of village prose is the topic of the article.

Features of village prose

Valentin Ovechkin is one of the first prose writers to glorify the life of the Russian hinterland on the pages of his works. The very definition of village prose did not immediately enter literary criticism. The affiliation of the authors, who today are commonly called "village writers", to a certain direction in prose for a long time was questioned. Nevertheless, over time, the term gained its right to exist. And this happened after the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s story “ Matrenin Dvor" Village prose began to be understood not just as works dedicated to village residents, but also as a complex of artistic and stylistic features. What are they?

Writers-"villagers" in their works raised issues of ecology and the preservation of national Russian traditions. talked about history, culture, moral aspects in the life of the inhabitants of the outback. One of the brightest representatives of village prose is F. Abramov.

In his small, succinct works, he was able to show the life of an entire generation, whose representatives, as we know, especially experienced the consequences historical events 20s of the last century, the hardships of the post-war period. But the work of this prose writer will be briefly discussed below. First, it’s worth giving a list of “village” writers.

Representatives of village prose

At the origins literary direction F. Abramov stood. V. Belov and V. Rasputin are also placed on a par with this writer. It would be impossible to reveal the theme of Russian village prose without mentioning such works as “The Tsar Fish” by Astafiev, “ Living water» Krupina and, of course, Solzhenitsyn’s Matrenin Dvor. Vasily Shukshin made an important contribution to the development of village prose. A bright rustic flavor is present on the pages of Vasily Belov’s books. The list of writers who dedicated their works to the morals and traditions of the Russian village also includes N. Kochin, I. Akulov, B. Mozhaev, S. Zalygin.

Interest in “village” writers was observed in the 80s. However, with the collapse of the USSR, other genres became popular. Today, the books of Vasily Belov, Fyodor Abramov, Valentin Rasputin, and the stories of Alexander Solzhenitsyn have become new life. They are regularly republished and filmed based on them. art films(films “Live and Remember” 2008, “Matrenin’s Dvor” 2013).

Fedorov Abramov

One of the most famous representatives of village prose was born in the Arkhangelsk region, but most spent his life in Leningrad. Abramov volunteered for the front in 1941 and went through the entire war. And only after its completion was I able to receive higher education at the Faculty of Russian Philology.

Abramov is called the patriarch of village prose for the scrupulousness with which he tried to comprehend the causes of the tragedy of the peasantry, social features villages. Addressing this topic put Abramov on a par with the most significant figures in Soviet literature of the sixties and seventies.

Why were so many forced to leave in the 50s? native home and go to town? Abramov, along with Shukshin and Rasputin, tries to answer this question in his works, which have long become classics of Russian prose. At the same time, the fate of the hero who left the village is always tragic. Abramov's style, like the style of other country writers, is not characterized by grotesqueness or imagery. The most significant work in the work of this prose writer is the novel “Brothers and Sisters”.

Vasily Belov

This writer is a native of the village of Timonikha Vologda region. About hardships village life Belov knew firsthand. His father died during the Second World War, his mother, like millions Soviet women, was forced to raise the children on her own. And she had five of them. In one of his works, “Years of No Return,” the writer told about the life of his relatives - village residents.

Belov lived for many years in Vologda, not far from his small homeland, in which he drew material for literary creativity. The story “An Ordinary Business” brought wide fame to the writer. And it was this work that secured him the title of one of the representatives of village prose. In Belov's stories and stories there are no harsh plot twists, there are few events and almost no intrigue. Belov's advantage is the ability to masterfully use vernacular, create vivid images villagers.

Valentin Rasputin

A famous prose writer once said that it was his duty to talk about the village and glorify it in his works. He, like other writers about whom we're talking about in this article, grew up in the village. Graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology. His debut in literature was the publication of the story “The Edge Near the Sky.” “Money for Maria” brought fame.

In the seventies, the books of Rasputin Valentin Grigorievich enjoyed considerable popularity among the Soviet intelligentsia. The most famous works- “Farewell to Matera”, “Live and Remember”. It was they who put the prose writer among the best modern Russian writers.

Other Valentin Grigorievich - collections that included the stories “The Last Term”, “Ivan’s Daughter, Ivan’s Mother”, “Fire” and the stories “Bonfires of New Cities”, “Siberia, Siberia”. More than once, filmmakers have turned to the work of this writer. In addition to “Live and Remember,” it is worth mentioning other films created based on the works of Rasputin. Namely: “Vasily and Vasilisa”, “Meeting”, “Money for Maria”, “Rudolfio”.

Sergey Zalygin

This author is often considered a representative of rural prose. Sergei Pavlovich Zalygin held the position of editor of Novy Mir for several years. Thanks to him and some other writers, publication resumed in the late 80s. As for the work of Zalygin himself, he created such stories as “Oskin Argish”, “On Mainland", "Morning Flight", "Ordinary People".

Ivan Akulov

“Kasyan Ostudny” and “Tsar Fish” are stories included in the list of the most significant works village prose. Their author, Akulov Ivan Ivanovich, was born in peasant family. In the village future writer lived until he was nine years old. And then the family moved to the city of Sverdlovsk. Ivan Akulov went through the war and was demobilized in 1946 with the rank of captain. Creative path it began in the 50s. But, oddly enough, he did not start writing about the war. In their literary works he recreated the images that he remembered in his childhood - images of simple villagers who had endured a lot of adversity, but had not lost their strength and faith.

Vasily Shukshin

It is worth telling about this writer, known not only as a representative of rural prose, but also as a director and screenwriter, possessing a rare original talent. Vasily Shukshin was from Altai Territory. The theme of a small homeland ran like a red thread in his work. The heroes of his books are contradictory; they cannot be classified as either negative or positive characters. Shukshin’s images are alive and real. After the end of the war, the future writer and director, like many young people, went to work Big city. But the image of the village remained in his memory, and later such works were born short prose, as in "Cut", " Mother's heart", "Red viburnum".

"Matrenin's Dvor"

Solzhenitsyn cannot be classified as a representative of village prose. Nevertheless, the story “Matrenin’s Dvor” is one of best works, reflecting the life of rural residents. The heroine of the story is a woman devoid of self-interest, envy, and anger. The components of her life are love, compassion, work. And this heroine is by no means the author’s invention. Solzhenitsyn met the prototype of Matryona in the village of Miltsevo. The heroine of Solzhenitsyn's story is an illiterate village resident, but she attracts the attention of readers, as Tvardovsky said, no less than Anna Karenina.

Anna Razuvalova

"Redneck" Writers: Literature and Conservative Ideology of the 1970s

“THE VILLAGERS”: RE-READING (instead of a foreword)

Several times in response to the words that I was writing a work about late Soviet literary conservatism - about the “villages”, I heard from interlocutors whose youth fell in the 1960s: “Are the villagers conservatives? Yes... of course, conservatives... And yet it’s strange - it seems like it was just recently.” What caused some hesitation in the conversation, as it now seems to me, was not the term “conservatives” itself in relation to this trend, but something about how he reminded - about characters, circumstances, the atmosphere of those times when the “villagers” were called “reactionaries”, but it was possible to relate to this stigma even to the “branded” ( it's already possible) differently. An intellectual of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era, depending on ideological preferences, could see in the “groundless” authors representatives of the peasant “small-proprietary element” who doubted the “conquests of October”, or the embodiment of “Russianness”, not killed by the “Soviet”, bearers of “outdated” morality and village prejudices or ethically concerned intellectuals who clearly discerned the features of an approaching cultural crisis. However, the reasons why in the “long 1970s” a seemingly purely tasteful statement about “village prose”, compliments or reproaches addressed to it, easily turned into something more - be it evidence of the “spiritual and moral” aspirations of an individual or a designation of his ideological position will be the subject of discussion in this book, but for now I’ll just note that not much has changed since then. Yes, the “villagers” have long ceased to be active characters in the modern literary scene, but if we talk about them, it turns out that for some readers with a Soviet cultural background they are still a phenomenon not so much of a literary, but of a social nature, “imaginary "values that arose in the atmosphere of false late Soviet hypermoralism, and for the other - modern classics who created convincing art worlds, telling about the “eternal” (about the soul, memory, life and death), and to include them within the limits of socio-ideological collisions means not to see the main thing in them. These disputes reproduce again and again the symbolic (and other) differences between different groups readership, including its “professional” part. Around the remark of the famous philologist “Just out of interest, I re-read almost all the works of your early Rasputin and now I (irresponsibly) declare: “This is impossible and unnecessary to read, This– very bad prose!” social network a polemic unfolds with the mention of many names, the involvement of experts who remember “how it was,” argumentation from ethics and aesthetics; judgments expressed along the way (for example: “Have you gone crazy there in Moscow? Well, Rasputin, of course, is not a genius of language, but V.V. Lichutin is certainly not. In the West he would be considered the first national writer, for “ level of language”, and not soil clichés...”) accumulate obvious and hidden prejudices that determine our perception of literature as such and (non)acceptance of “hillbillies” in particular - here is indignation at metropolitan tastes, and the default antithesis of “low” ( ideology, “ground clichés”) and “high” (“language”), and the desire to rehabilitate the relatively late “villager” Lichutin, recalling the “genuine” criteria of artistic value.

In a curious way, the late Soviet and perestroika debates around “village prose,” as well as the features of its “nobilization,” influenced the institutional structure of the philological environment that studied the creativity of the “neo-soilers” (their study is usually localized in the universities of those regions with which the writers were associated), and her theoretical and methodological preferences. The contexts for philological interpretation of traditionalist prose (“hillbillies”) offered in this environment are often quite traditional in themselves. Speaking about “traditionality,” I mean, firstly, the dependence of such contexts on the ideas of right-wing, national-conservative criticism of the “long 1970s” (to this day it is believed that it was she who correctly interpreted the axiology and stylistics of the “village” school ), secondly, their stability and replicability, which is especially noticeable if we look at articles in university collections and candidate’s dissertations that are massively supplied to the Russian scientific market. Researchers of “village prose” have very definite ideas about the ideology and poetics of “neo-soil” traditionalism; there are a number of ready-made definitions for each of the prominent authors of this school, and accordingly problematization traditionalist discourse about traditionalism perceived as an ethical challenge - undermining authority modern classics Russian literature. However, the circle that for some reason - aesthetic and/or ideological - rejects “village prose”, sees in it a popular print or a statement that is far from all norms of political correctness, is also usually guided by presuppositions that cannot be problematized. Based on the current state of affairs, I tried to solve two problems in the book: firstly, to find new, unaccounted for contexts that would help to comprehend the emergence of the “neo-soil” literary community and those rhetorical and ideological formulas that created it, and secondly, re-interpret the problems typical for “village dwellers” (ecological, regionalist, national-patriotic), looking at it not so much as a set of plot-style models that “reflect” empirics public life, as much as a tool for self-description and self-understanding of national conservatives. Hence the structure of the book, in which there is no narrative unfolding sequentially from section to section, but there is a pendulum-like return to the themes and problems identified in the first chapter and associated with the rethinking of the problems typical of the “villagers” for possible implications of a right-wing conservative and nationalist nature (chronologically in the center attention mainly to the “long 1970s,” although in Chapter I I turn to the events of the late 1950s, and in Chapters IV and V to the period of perestroika). Issues of poetics and narratalogy are touched upon sporadically in the book; I focus on them only to the extent that they are necessary to outline the semantic boundaries of “neo-soil” conservatism and clarify certain socio-psychological aspects of “village” literature.

B O The majority of this book was written during a three-year doctoral study at the Center for Theoretical-Literary and Interdisciplinary Research of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. I would like to thank my colleagues - Alexander Panchenko, Valery Vyugin, Kirill Anisimov, Sergei Shtyrkov, Valentin Golovin, Igor Kravchuk - for their sympathetic interest in this work and express my most sincere gratitude to my scientific consultant Konstantin Bogdanov. I owe a lot to his precise and subtle advice, comments, and invariably friendly help. For the opportunity to publish in the New Literary Review - my most sincere thanks to Irina Prokhorova.

“I AM A CONSERVATIVE. EVEN RETROGRADE": "NEO-SOLAR" TRADITIONALISM - REVOLUTION AND REACTION

“Village prose” as an object of critical projections

Kochergin's stories are straightforward, the lines of his prose are harmonious, but the writer's life path, on the contrary, is very tortuous. He was born and studied in the capital, then went to Siberia, where he wrote his “Altai Stories,” which received several literary awards, including the Moscow Government Prize.

- The pride of Soviet literature: Vasily Belov, Valentin Rasputin, Viktor Astafiev...Which of the so-called country writers are you closest to?

I think that Astafiev - perhaps precisely because he was somewhat broader than his fellow writers.

At the age of 15–16, I was literally engrossed in his “Tsar Fish” and it was because of this book that I began to dream of going to the Yenisei someday.

- As children, we are all romantics. But it seems that the village writers had a very clear adult goal - to save the village from dying. And, alas, they failed...

But it seems to me that they already understood that nothing could be saved. Their literature was the literature of farewell and an attempt to live this farewell: just look at the titles - “Farewell to Matera”, “Last Bow”, “Last Sorrow”. In Russia, this happens very often: something grandiose happens that is comprehended not at the state level, but at the literary level.

- There is a feeling that this understanding was quite idealistic.

Belov, Rasputin, Astafiev, Shukshin - they were all idealists. That is why, thanks to them, the myth of the village arose as a powerful ideal world on which you can rely and to which it would be good to return in order to fall back to your roots. Although even at that time there was nothing particularly useful there.

- Why was this world so interesting to urban readers?

Because he was completely unfamiliar to them - just like, say, the worlds of the Strugatsky brothers or Alexandre Dumas. The unknown always attracts.

However, the world of Dumas and the Strugatskys excites many generations, while the world of the villagers today is of little interest to anyone.

- Do you think she's dying?

Yes. Although wonderful people still live in the village. In the village in the Ryazan region where I built a house, there is a farmer Vitya Nazarov.

Village prose a long time ago, alas, remained in history. She's gone. There are authors who write on the theme of the village - Boris Ekimov, Roman Senchin, Dmitry Novikov from Petrozavodsk, who creates wonderful “northern” prose. But these are all works of a completely different genre. I am a person myself, born in the center of Moscow, a villager by a very stretch.

- Well, who are you?

I am a person who settled in a village in a place where Finno-Ugrians once lived, and before that representatives of some unexplored culture of the Middle Oka burial grounds.

- For what?

My parents dreamed that I would follow in their footsteps and become a chemical engineer, and I tried to find my way. And I'm not the only one! In 1990, when I sent letters to all the reserves of the Union asking for a job, there were no vacancies anywhere. Only from Gorny Altai did I receive an answer that there was a bet. All states were filled with romantics from large cities. In the taiga huts there were collections of French poetry, thick literary magazines...

Apparently, there is a constant flow of not only an influx into the cities, but also a reverse movement. Look at the bright representative - the wonderful writer Mikhail Tarkovsky, the nephew of Andrei Tarkovsky, has been living for more than thirty years in the village of Bakhta on the Yenisei and works as a commercial hunter.

- Well, how did it seem to you, a Muscovite, there in Siberia?

- Did you learn a lot there?

Still would! To milk the cows and bake bread—food was brought to us only twice a year. And also - writing long letters to his wife, thanks to which he eventually became a writer.

DIRECT SPEECH

Igor Shaitanov, critic, literary secretary of the Russian Booker Prize:

And today... Well, you understand.

REFERENCE

Winner of the Moscow Government Prize in the field of literature for “Altai Stories”.