About the Author

VALENTIN RASPUTIN (1937-2015) was a patriarch of the so-called village prose writers who emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1960s to address moral and environmental issues and depict the remains of a rural Russia about to be consumed by industrialization. Among his best-selling works is the 1976 novel Farewell to Matyora (Northwestern University Press, 1995) about an island village on the Angara River that is about to be subsumed in the 1960s by construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric plant and the elderly residents who resist resettlement. He served in the Congress of People's Deputies from 1989 to 1990.

Reviews

"[Rasputin's] books are full of real people with real human conflicts." --Library Journal

"Rasputin is the kind of writer of whom Chekhov, that most sensible of all Russian writers, would have approved--a man linked to the soil through its people, apolitical without being nihilistic, profoundly humane." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Rasputin's work opens up to the reader a land and a people who are, on the one hand, cruel, harsh, and cold as a Siberian winter and, on the other hand, as tender, warm, and gentle as a Siberian spring." --Choice

A respected contemporary novelist whose translated works include Farewell to Matyora (Northwestern Univ., 1991), Raspurtin here ventures to give an overview of a part of the world whose very name "has long sounded like a warning bell announcing something vaguely powerful and imminent." Indeed, since its frozen wastes have long served as a dumping ground for political prisoners of all persuasions, it hardly seems like an alluring place to visit. Yet Siberia has its own rich heritage, which Rasputin enthusiastically outlines. This is not a travel guide or popular history but a detailed, scholarly treatment of a vast territory that carefully documents its history as it moves region by region through it. The writing is not as mellifluous as one might expect of a novelist, but here Rasputin is a man with a serious purpose: to place in carefully reconstructed time and space an area that has seemed infinite. For academic libraries.‘Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

"[Rasputin's] books are full of real people with real human conflicts." --Library Journal
"Rasputin is the kind of writer of whom Chekhov, that most sensible of all Russian writers, would have approved--a man linked to the soil through its people, apolitical without being nihilistic, profoundly humane." --The Christian Science Monitor
"Rasputin's work opens up to the reader a land and a people who are, on the one hand, cruel, harsh, and cold as a Siberian winter and, on the other hand, as tender, warm, and gentle as a Siberian spring." --Choice