Village prose

chauvinism, nationalism or nostalgia?

Kathleen Parthé

pp. 106-121

in: Sheelagh Duffin Graham (ed), New directions in Soviet literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992

Abstract

One of the thorniest critical debates about the legacy of Russian village prose at the end of the 1980s had to do with the relationship between rural literature and the rise of extreme Russian nationalist groups, especially Pamyat. Such actions as the public expression by several erstwhile derevenshchiki of affinity with some of Pamyat's ideas, the way some of these same writers wielded power in the RSFSR Writers' Union, and the signing — along with many urban writers — of collective letters of a generally xenophobic and specifically anti-Semitic character have led to a linking both in the USSR and the West of village prose with chauvinism. Among the contemporary rereadings of post-revolutionary works and movements is the rereading of derevenskaia proza as a'seedbed" for chauvinism. To a certain extent, this view has replaced previous assessments of the same literature as being primarily nationalistic or just nostalgic. My chapter will attempt to untangle this complex situation first by defining this literary movement, and then by distinguishing the legacy of canonical village prose from the activities of people who at one time wrote this type of literature, and from literary critics and ideologues who have adapted metaphors from village prose for their own uses.