cover image Stories from a Siberian Village

Stories from a Siberian Village

Vasily Shukshin. Northern Illinois University Press, $18 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-87580-572-6

Shukshin's brief but remarkable life is remembered in Russia as one of legendary proportions. Coming to Moscow to apply to its exclusive film academy, he was ridiculed as a country hick. Indeed, his Siberian village in the '50s was as remote from the capital in culture and refinement as it was in distance. Shukshin stubbornly remained rooted in his origins, and his works revolved around just that rustic peasant culture. His subsequent success as a writer, actor and film director (he was director and star of the very popular Kalina Krasnaya, which was released in 1974, the year of his death) was phenomenal. In some ways, the 25 village stories included here fit as much the Soviet idealization of the peasant as the storytelling tradition of Gogol and Gorky. The country dialect (less successful in translation) and humble concerns mislead urbanites into complaisant expectations of naive, wholesome tales. Instead, Shukshin avenges himself for the derision he suffered at the hands of intellectual snobs. His antiheroes are introspective loners, their thinking full of the philosophical reflections and cynicism those intellectuals assume is their private domain. In the rural and uncluttered settings he depicts, these reflections attain a rarefied clarity and inevitability. Like so many Russians before him, Shukshin loved his peasants; he was awed by their wisdom, their seeming completeness. These were his people, and his heart ached to embrace the entire depth of their passions. (Oct.)