Siberia, Siberia

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.'"" (July)