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Siberia, Siberia, by Valentin Rasputin
Download PDF Siberia, Siberia, by Valentin Rasputin
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Valentin Rasputin--one of the most gifted and influential Russian prose writers of the past thirty years--offers a sweeping account of and penetrating reflection on the Russians' four hundred years of experience in Siberia. Beginning with Yermak, whose Cossacks crossed into Siberia in the 1580s, through the rapid Russian exploration, conquest, and colonialization, to today, Rasputin reveals the peculiarities of the Siberians, studying the gap between dreams and reality that has plagued Russians in Siberia for centuries.
- Sales Rank: #1993283 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Northwestern University Press
- Published on: 1997-10-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.33" h x 1.04" w x 6.09" l, 1.37 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 438 pages
- Russian History, Russia, Sibrian history
- culture
Amazon.com Review
Valentin Rasputin, born in 1937, is "one of the Soviet Union's most brilliant writers," according to Bonnie Carey in World Literature Today. He has always lived and worked in Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal in Siberia, and became known for his realistic depiction of village life, and the absence of ideology in his work. Siberia is a cold, almost unlivable wilderness, a by-word for isolation and punishment. In recent decades parts of it have been despoiled by rapacious mining activities. This nonfiction account of his beloved land is at times beautifully descriptive, but is also an angry assertion of the identity of a region exploited by the policies of central government. Translated by Margaret Winchell and Gerald Mikkelson.
From Publishers Weekly
Rasputin is best known in this country for short fiction set in his native Siberia, most recently his 1985 novella, The Fire. Since then, he has devoted himself to a genre that Winchell and Mikkelson define in their excellent introduction as "the category of social commentary and polemics known in Russia by the untranslatable world publitsistika." In curious contrast to the devastating political subtlety of Russian fiction, publitsistika can be discomfittingly zealous. Not that Western readers will take any exception to Rasputin's cause: Siberia is in danger of losing, he says, its enormously fertile environment, its monuments and even its spirit. He traces that spirit back to the misty 16th-century history of Cossacks and of the more legendary Novogorod freemen who fled Ivan the Terrible for the chilly reaches of Siberia. Rasputin describes a procession of freedom seekers from Old Believers to Decembrists filing into a landscape that is equally untamed (one river he says was "born freely and living freely"), but he manages almost entirely to avoid Soviet-era political prisoners. On the other hand, he's perfectly willing to take the government to task for its many outrageous environmental depredations. It's the bureaucratic callousness of the exploitation that's so chilling. In one case, Rasputin recalls visiting what had been one of the last great tracts of Siberian pine. "As we were hiking down to the clear-cut zones, we came across a sign nailed to one of the surviving pine trees. Its inscription read: 'Welcome to a restful outing in the woods. While enjoying the woods, do not break off or cut down any bushes or trees: protect the birds and animals and do not destroy their nesting places.'"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
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"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A brilliant translation of a magnificent book.
By Music Fan
Valentin Rasputin is one of Russia's greatest living writers and may well be remembered one day as the country's finest author of the twentieth century. Mikkelson and Winchell achieve the nearly impossible in translating the poetic power and beauty of Rasputin's style as well as his content.
Siberia, Siberia is an essential book for anyone with an interest in this fascinating region. A wonderous read.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By CLIFFORD R. SCOTT
A real praise to Siberia!!!
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
In Praise of Lost Things
By S. Smith-Peter
Valentin Rasputin comes from a village that is now underwater, flooded by the massive Bratsk Dam in Siberia. He seeks to preserve what has survived the flood and fire of the Soviet era and to awaken his reader to a moral awareness of the need to preserve and protect Siberia.
He asks where most Russians stand, "on the side of paternal memory, on which the people's prosperity depends to a large extent, or on the side of a militant carelessness toward sacred things that we can't seem to outgrow? Whom will we be with and whom will we be against when the cleansing period of sobering up finally sets in?" (287) It's clear which side he's on, and he wants to bring his readers over to it.
He seeks to convince two groups -- political leaders and the intelligentsia -- of the need to preserve the past. The first is an obvious audience, since the Soviets destroyed so much, both by actual demolition and by extreme pollution. The second group is more implied but is still there. The intelligentsia of Moscow and St. Petersburg tend to have a dismissive attitude toward the provinces, which I have termed the "Gogolian paradigm." This involves an argument that the provinces are all the same in order to show one's identification with the intelligentsia of the two capitals. Rasputin doesn't agree with this and identifies himself with his native Siberia and shows how different its different parts are. After all, Siberia is larger than the United States and Europe combined, so it only makes sense that it's not all the same.
There is a useful introduction by the editors, which gives the larger historical context of the book, written during perestroika, and also a short synopsis of each chapter. The body of the book consists of a series of essays on different parts of Siberia. Each chapter shows the dangers that this part of Siberia faces. For example, the chapter on Tobolsk, once the capital of Siberia and the site of the most important Russian victory over the Khanate of Sibir', begins by explaining how important the town is to the Russian people and ends by shows how endangered it is. In particular, the Lower Town, below the Tobolsk kremlin, is sinking into the ground and many important churches and buildings are being lost.
The next chapter, on Baikal, is a model of persuasive writing. He begins by describing how beautiful and unique Lake Baikal is. His writing about nature is very lyrical, more so than his writing about towns. Readers who want to smile should look for video of the nerpa. They are a seal unique to Baikal and - well, you should just look. Only after fully involving the reader does he turn to a discussion of the pollution and willful defiling of the lake by an unnecessary placement of a cellulose factory at its shores. (By the way, this factory closed down for a while because it wasn't making money, but then has recently unfortunately reopened.)
Rasputin's writing on nature is more open and free than his writing on towns, even when those towns are important to Russian history. For example, the section on Irkutsk, where he has lived, isn't nearly as joyous as his chapter on the Gorno-Altai region, which he presents as a region of beauty and wonder. Also, in that chapter, he presents his ideal man, a Russian forest ranger named N.P. Smirnov. Smirnov lives entirely in harmony with nature. Smirnov's wife is an indigenous Siberian, and its clear that Rasputin sees this as another example of his authenticity.
The chapter that presents an entire community living in harmony with nature is that on Russkoe Ustye, a series of villages on the Indirka River in the far north. He argues that Russians fled from Ivan the Terrible and settled there, where extremely old versions of the Russian language have been preserved. By the way, he accepts Russian intermarriage with natives and is more concerned with the continuation of the Russian language than with a separate Russian ethnicity in the region. Perhaps this is because he sees the language as the true marker of Russianness. The whole way of life of this region is endangered, though, and Rasputin doesn't think it will survive.
Rasputin feels both the gloom and joy of ruins. The chapter on Kyakhta, the Russian border town with China that once held many rich and enlightened Russian merchants, is one of the best examples of this. Although little of Kyakhta's glory days remain, it hasn't been scarred by Soviet development. It is true that the Soviet version of modernism is the most aggressively ugly I've ever seen, and the thought that no tower blocks were built in Kyakhta seems something worthy of applause. Rasputin would rather contemplate falling down wooden houses than such tower blocks and I can't really blame him.
One of the themes of the book is a rehabilitation of pre-revolutionary Siberian bureaucrats and merchants. He argues that they did more good for the region than many others. Here, it's clear that he means Soviet bureaucrats.
The conclusion makes clear that Rasputin sees himself as the successor of the Siberian regionalists, who argued for Siberian autonomy in the late imperial period, as well as the Slavophiles. The title "Your Siberia and Mine" also shows how he wants to have the reader invest in Siberia emotionally and morally. At the end is a useful bibliography of English-language titles on Siberia and an index.
For those interested in Siberia and Russian history, this is a book worth reading.
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