Copyright ©2000 by Maxim D. Shrayer.  All rights reserved.

Anti-Semitism and the Decline of Russian Village Prose

Maxim D. Shrayer

How do we negotiate between an author’s aesthetic achievement and ethical abomination? How do we make sense of a writer who speaks with artistic honesty about his native people, and yet with blindness and hostility about ethnic and religious groups this writer deems alien to the culture and spirit of his land? In studying the dynamics of an author’s career, should we seek to identify explosions of intolerance on the trajectory of an author’s growth and change? Even a brief glance at the heated discussion that followed the publication of Anthony Julius’s T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1995) is enough to convince us that allegations of a given writer’s religious or ethnic prejudice can and often do polarize the critics’ judgments about the writer.

In Russia’s cultural space, where writers debate political issues in daily newspapers and politicians compose novels and poems in jail, an author’s position on the Jewish question has often served as both a barometer and shaper of public opinion. From the 1860s onward, Russian writers have played a key role in formulating and presenting the Jewish question to the public at large. From my perspective, the main problem is not the novelty or profundity of a Russian author’s writing against the Jews, but rather the fact that anti-Semitic ideas were given national legitimacy by being sandwiched between profound discussions of Russian people and brilliant descriptions of the Russian countryside. In studying anti-Semitism in literature, I have focused not only on the meaning of the message about the Jews—a message that is more often than not crude and pedestrian—but also on the ideological and cultural codes that engender it. This brings me to the following inquiry into the dynamics of the Jewish question in the writings of Russian Village Prose.

The dissonant voices of the derevenshchiki (Village Writers) were especially manifest on the Soviet literary scene in the 1970s and early 1980s. Although never directly anti-Soviet, these writers managed to be critical of what they perceived to be the causes of the disintegration of Russian village life. In the mid-1970s, due in part to the growing activities of the Russian ultra-nationalist movement within the Soviet cultural establishment, as well as the repercussions of the increasing exodus of Soviet Jews, many Village Writers embraced a tendentious narrative of twentieth-century Russian history. Among other things in this narrative, the Jews were held responsible for destroying the Russian village as the backbone of Russian life, turning Russia into a secular country, controlling and manipulating Russian culture and media, and finally, abandoning Russia on the brink of a national disaster. Surely, the Russian Village Writers were neither the first nor the last—in Russia or elsewhere—to blame their country’s hardships on the Jews. What makes them so fascinating to a student of the Jewish question is the cohesion and intensity with which they acted “the role of mediator,” to employ René Girard’s term, by bridging the “gap between the insignificance of the individual [be it an ethnic Russian or a Jew] and the enormity of the social body.”

The literary model that has suggested my mode of inquiry finds its most famous example in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). According to this dynamic model, ethical degradation inevitably leads to aesthetic disfigurement. The decline of Russian Village Prose came not only owing to the stagnation and impeding end of the Soviet system, but also as a result of a conflict of an artist and a nationalist thinker within the Village Writers. Unable or unwilling to write of the Jews with the same truthfulness and responsibility as they did of the Russians, some Village Writers expressed their anger and confusion in extremist discursive statements, while others turned away from the fictions of village life to mediocre urban or historical prose.

Below I will consider briefly the careers of three preeminent representatives of Russian Village Prose, Viktor Astaf’ev (b. 1924), Valentin Rasputin (b. 1937), and Vasilii Belov (b. 1934). These writers exhibit different trajectories in postwar Soviet literature, that of a war veteran, a self-made intellectual, and a peasant Communist.

. . .

Orphaned as a teenager, the prolific Viktor Astaf’ev was decorated for heroic conduct in World War II and worked a number of menial jobs before turning to writing. From his first publications in the 1950s onward, Astaf’ev’s works have been marked by a hostility toward the intelligentsia, whose members, not infrequently Jewish, are shown to display haughtiness and limited understanding of the life of the common Russian folk. With a few exceptions, Astaf’ev depicts Jewish characters negatively and stereotypically as dishonest, arrogant, and cowardly. In Poslednii poklon [The Last Bow, 1968-1988; 1989; here and hereafter all translations from the Russian are mine]—a long cycle of stories and memoiristic sketches—an autobiographical protagonist recalls an encounter with a Jewish schoolteacher, Sof’ia Veniaminovna. Astaf’ev describes her as a “red-headed little bird, commonly inhabiting Russian forests, a pretty bird, but furtive, sneaky and terribly annoying”—hardly a loving image of Russian Jews. In a bout of hatred for Jews and intellectuals, the young ruffian physically assaults the teacher. The story is recalled by the adult author who still finds the Jewish teacher repulsive, and his teenage self worthy of praise. In several places, Astaf’ev employs anti-Jewish allegories and double entendres, such as a reference to Jewish repairmen who have ruined a Russian writer’s “golden pen.”

Only in one work, not surprisingly his greatest, did Astaf’ev attempt to go beyond anti-Jewish stereotypes. His masterpiece, Tsar’-ryba [Czar-Fish, 1977], is a discontinuous novel, a group of tales loosely connected structurally by the author-protagonist’s unifying persona. Set in Siberia between the 1930s and the 1970s, Czar-Fish laments the disappearance of the collective spirit of familial and neighborly love and support among denizens of rural communities, a spirit idealized in the childhood episodes set on the Siberian river Enisei and its tributaries. Especially brilliant and telling of the writer’s nostalgia for the pastoral are the early childhood scenes, where the writer’s own recollections are merged with fictional memories of his privileged protagonist Akim, whose name derives from the Hebrew for “G-d will lift up.”

In Czar-Fish, Astaf’ev deals with the Jewish question with a depth that none of his other works can match. The early-to-middle 1970s, when he was working on the book, were the time of Astaf’ev’s transition from the cardboard portrayals of Jews in his earlier fiction to the overtly and viciously anti-Semitic discursive statements he would make in the middle-to-late 1980s. Brooding over the devastation of Russian nature and decrying the rise of both extreme individualism and greed among his fellow citizens, Astaf’ev sought to find a mythopoetic model of and a truthful—truthful in his mind—explanation for the losses of environmental and human values. In Czar-Fish, several motifs of the Gospel narratives of Christ’s preaching and martyrdom are superimposed on the archetypal fratricidal story of Cain and Abel. The relations between the Russians and the Jews find an allegorical embodiment in the story of fishing as both soul-searching and Christ-killing. At the same time, the relationship between the Russians and the Jews is presented as a triangle of desire, in which the competition is literally for a woman and figuratively for Russia herself.

A central sequence of the novel tells about the two Utrobin brothers, two fishermen, whose lives in a remote Siberian village are scarred by mutual hostility and visions of fratricide (the last name Utrobin derives from the Russian noun utroba meaning “womb”). While poaching, the older brother hooks a giant sturgeon, which the local folklore refers to as “Czar-Fish.” The fish is so big and powerful that the older Utrobin cannot handle it alone. He considers summoning his brother for help but decides against it. As the fisherman struggles to pull the fish into the boat it capsizes, and he is caught on his own lines. The bleeding fish and the bleeding man are now literally connected. The fish eventually unhooks itself and breaks free, leaving the fisherman either to die or to be rescued by his brother—one cannot tell from the open ending. While the Utrobin brothers are ethnic Russians, it is the Old Testament motif of fratricide—coupled as it is with killing a fish as an allegory of killing Christ—that suggests a mythopoetic treatment of the Jewish question. If Astaf’ev, who refers to the giant sturgeon as “Czar” (recall Christ’s royal lineage, but also the murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918), is indeed attempting a complex allegory of the relationship between the Russians and the Jews, his vision might amount to the following. On the one hand, from a conventional anti-Semitic perspective shared by many Russian nationalists, the Jews are collectively held responsible for the killing of Christ (and the last Russian Czar). In this sense, the older Utrobin brother acts as a “Jew” in trying to slay the Czar-Fish. (In fact, several Jewish poachers appear in the novel.) On the other hand, anti-Semitism itself, and such extreme forms of it as the killing of Jews, reproduces the act of Christ-killing. This second perspective goes back to early Christianity (e.g., St. Bernard of Clairvaux) and finds much prominence in the writings of Russian religious philosophers, especially Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Berdiaev. Thus, in oppressing their Jewish brothers, ethnic Russians commit reprehensible and anti-Christian acts.

What made Astaf’ev employ Biblical allegories to depict the Russian-Jewish relations in his native country? It is not unlikely that he was alarmed by the fact that Soviet Jews were applying for exit visas in increasing numbers in the early-to-middle 1970s. (Between 1972 and 1974, when Astaf’ev wrote Czar-Fish, some eighty-five thousand Jews left the Soviet Union.) Furthermore, Astaf’ev’s perspective on the Jewish question changed while he was writing the novel, and as is often the case, repentance led to shame and further malice. The latter chapters consistently depict the Jews as guilty of ravaging the Russian countryside and of treating the Russian people with arrogance and superiority. Astaf’ev revealed a rabid intolerance against the Jews with the utmost clarity and directness in the character of Georgii (Goga) Gertsev—a predator and profiteer. Still, Astaf’ev concluded his novel with a rendition of the first eight verses of chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes. Speaking of “a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace,” the writer thus left some hope for the renewal of a Russian-Jewish dialogue. From here Astaf’ev’s career might have gone in opposite directions, one of tolerance or one of hostility and denial. He chose the latter path.

In 1984, a popular Moscow review of foreign literature, Inostrannaia literatura, printed a translation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. Less than two years later, Astaf’ev published Pechal’nyi detektiv [A Sad Detective], a novel that draws a horrific picture of a provincial Soviet city in the mid-1980s. In the same year, he also published the infamous short story “Lovlia peskarei v Gruzii” [“Catching Cudgeons in Georgia”]. In August of 1986, Astaf’ev received a letter from Natan Èidel’man (1930-1989), a Moscow historian of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Russian culture. Èidel’man’s letter, written not from the vantage point of a Jewish nationalist, but rather a liberal who is repulsed by any display of prejudice—be it against Georgians, Jews, or Kazakhs—contained a warning that Astaf’ev had betrayed his talent by succumbing to intolerance and xenophobia. Astaf’ev replied in the most intemperate manner. Èidel’man wrote his second, final letter, and the correspondence quickly became —in the words of the émigré writer Vl. Solovyov—a bestseller of late Soviet samizdat. What strikes one most about Astaf’ev’s reply—even more than its malevolent anger stemming from a sense of cultural inferiority—is a complete lack of independent thinking about the Jewish question. Astaf’ev made three main points in his letter. First he accused the Jews of being the enemies of the Russian national renaissance; according to Astaf’ev, they controlled Russian culture and regarded ethnic Russians with intellectual arrogance and contempt. Then he stated that the Jews destroyed Russian Orthodoxy and Monarchy, and were guilty of regicide: “the [last Czar and his family] were executed by the Jews and the Latvians, headed by the inveterate,  double-dyed Zionist Iurkovskii [sic; Astaf’ev refers to the Bolshevik Iurovskii].” Lastly, Astaf’ev suggested the problems that Jews encountered in the Soviet Union were a consequence of their own crimes against Russia, the crimes for which they were now paying.

Astaf’ev thus reproduced a primitive version of Western and Russian anti-Semitic ideas, a kind of crude selection from Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Shafarevich’s Russophobia, and official Soviet rhetoric on Judaism and the state of Israel. In an interview he gave to the Russian-French writer Dmitrii Savitskii in 1988, Astaf’ev commented on Èidel’man’s letters to him as a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Russian writers, referring to the Jews as “they,” as a “nation that has a habit of sticking itself in every hole.” He further revealed his inability to look for the root of the Jewish question by commenting: “They seem to have the whole world at their disposal; if it is bad here, they move to where it is better. We have nowhere to go. . . .” Finally, Astaf’ev admitted that his correspondence with Èidel’man and the scandal that ensued made him an even greater anti-Semite.

In his post-Soviet fiction, Astaf’ev returned to the subject of World War II, and to a stereotypical and predictable portrayal of Jewish characters, including a Jewish captain in the military police (Prokliaty i ubity [The Damned and the Killed, 1992]). At the same time, he has made reconciliatory statements in the press and distanced himself from ultra-nationalist activity. The liberal intelligentsia in Russia rewarded him by bestowing upon him the 1997 Pushkin Prize. (The writer Andrei Bitov presided over the ceremony in Moscow in May of 1997.) Tamed and neutralized as Astaf’ev might be, he will forever remain the Russian writer with some of the most viciously anti-Semitic statements to his credit.

. . .

As compared to his older contemporary Astaf’ev, Valentin Rasputin had an early start in his literary career: a staff journalist in a provincial Siberian newspaper in 1959-1961, he had become one of the most acclaimed Russian writers by the early 1970s. Set in Siberian villages, his fiction employs natural elements as large-scale mythological metaphors for the spiritual condition of the Russian people. The river Angara suggests the river Styx in Zhivi i pomni [Live and Remember, 1975]; a flooded island, whose inhabitants have been forced to abandon their homes, symbolizes Russia herself in Proshchanie s Matëroi [Farewell to Matëra, 1976]; a fire in a small Siberian town burns with the fierceness of an apocalyptic blaze in Pozhar [The Fire, 1985]. Rasputin’s works of fiction frequently employ open endings, raising the eternal questions and letting the reader find the answers. A moralist by natural inclination, Rasputin preaches only very slightly in his fictions. However, in the 1970s and early 1980s, he turned increasingly to the genre of the newspaper essay, speaking with the kind of moral authority that popular writers used to enjoy in Soviet Russia.

By the 1980s, Rasputin had emerged as a leading spokesman for ecological causes, such as keeping lake Baikal pollution-free. He also campaigned for the preservation of historical buildings, including churches and pre-Soviet wooden architecture. While his fiction remained free of Jewish characters, anti-Jewish sentiments had crept into his discursive works by the early 1980s. Jewish names were dropped when Rasputin talked of the officials who condoned the pollution of the environment and oversaw urban renovation. Historians of Soviet anti-Semitism know that the ultra-nationalist Pamiat’ movement (pamiat’ means “memory” in Russian) emerged in the 1980s as a grassroots movement of citizens for preservation of historical buildings and churches. In July of 1987, Rasputin addressed the Fifth Congress of the All-Russia Society for the Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture in Gor’kii (now Nizhnii Novgorod). The title of his speech was “To Sacrifice Oneself for the Sake of Truth: Against Unremembrance.” Rasputin defended the Pamiat’ movement from the attacks of the press and the “people, who have betrayed Russia, smeared her name, and later, not finding the Promised Land abroad, . . .returned” to Russia. Rasputin never mentioned the word Jew, but his allusions to Jews were quite transparent to the audience he addressed and the readers of the ultra-nationalist monthly Nash sovremennik [Our Contemporary], where the speech was printed. He referred to the logic of “the interests of their caste [kastovye interesy].” Speaking of “some people [est’ liudi] who do not like Russia regaining her memory,” Rasputin disseminated anti-Semitic ideas also present in the speeches and writings of the Pamiat’ leaders. “This is why,” he continued, “they are ready to make ‘memory’ [pamiat’] and ‘patriot’ swear words, as they did in the 1920s, and to declare the great creations of our ancestors primitive works and nationalistic poison.” (Rasputin voiced similar ideas in a speech at the Seventh Congress of Russian Writers in 1990.)

In 1990, Rasputin was interviewed by Bill Keller for an article on Russian nationalists that appeared in the New York Times Magazine; a year later the full text was printed in Peter Matthiessen’s long essay on Siberia in the New York Review of Books. Rasputin’s remarks on Russian-Jewish relations have raised many questions, both in Russia and in the West, about the moral integrity and intellectual honesty of a writer who had maintained so incessantly that a writer is first and foremost a mouthpiece of “truth.” “I think,” Rasputin told Keller, “that today the Jews should feel responsible for the sin of having carried out the revolution, and for the shape that it took. [They should feel responsible] for the terror. For the terror that existed during the revolution and especially after the revolution. They played a large role, and their guilt is great. Not for the killing of God, but for that.” Rasputin apparently felt that he had been unfairly targeted as Russia’s anti-Semitic writer. Although in the middle-to-late 1990s he abstained from making overt anti-Jewish statements, in 1997 he published “Moi manifest” (“My Manifesto”), where he spoke of Russian history as a succession of foreign dominations: German, French, Jewish, American. His fictional output has diminished even further. Rasputin’s recent short stories—dark, post-Soviet lamentations—are virtually free of anti-Semitism, as the ideologue has not completely ousted the writer of fiction.

. . .

A blond northerner with the bearded face of a Viking, Vasilii Belov joined the Communist Party at twenty-four. He began his career as a local Komsomol apparatchik and an epigone of peasant poets. The publication of the short novel Privychnoe delo [The Usual Thing, 1966] made him instantly famous. The Russian nationalist wing of the Writers’ Union targeted him as one of their spokesmen, and exaggerated his talent and originality in reviews. Vadim Kozhinov, the éminence grise of the nationalist cultural movement, wrote homiletic articles about Belov and his fiction. Belov’s artistic forte are first-person tales which capture the language and mind-set of his native peasants of the North of European Russia. Combining elements of skaz narration with peasant and kolkhoz folklore, Belov’s tales were an alternative to much of the formulaic Soviet writing about the village.

Belov’s anti-Semitism is of the most consistent and political kind. Expressed primarily through fiction, it is the least camouflaged by patriotism and soul-searching. In Tseluiutsia zori [The Dawns Kiss, 1975]—a screenplay that Belov published as a short novel—the peasant characters come upon A. B. Fokel’man, a caricature of a Jewish dentist. In Vospitanie po doktoru Spoku [Child-Rearing According to Dr. Spock, 1968; 1978], an alcoholic protagonist leaves his family and temporarily stays in the apartment of his Jewish co-worker Misha Fridburg. This is the narrator’s comment about Fridburg’s household: “But after two nights, spent in the orderly, falsely benevolent atmosphere of the Jewish family, he went to stay with uncle Pasha [a Russian friend].” Belov stirs up resentment of the Jews by drawing on the stereotype of a tightly knit and functional Jewish family—as opposed to the Russian protagonist’s own dysfunctional family.

In the early 1970s, Belov embarked on a new project, a cycle of historical novels about the destruction of the Russian village during the Soviet period. This was the kind of scapegoating that the right-wing circles within the literary establishment, the Communist Party, and the KGB certainly encouraged, as it distracted the people from the present by offering a salutary anti-Semitic narrative of the past. Prior to the appearance of the complete edition, the first novel in Belov’s cycle, Kanuny: Roman-khronika kontsa 20-kh godov (The Eves: Novel-Chronicle of the Late 1920s, 1972-1976-1987; 1988), was published in parts, in a regional journal, then in a publishing house with a nationalist orientation, then in a leading literary review Novyi mir. The title refers to the time when preparations for the massive collectivization were being mounted in the rural areas of Russia. The anti-Jewish thrust of his novel becomes immediately apparent. From the top down to the local level, the Party line is enforced by the Jews, who feel no connection to the land or its people.

The Eves afforded a foretaste of Belov’s potential for making historical fiction a domain of anti-Semitic myths. The real explosion came in the next installment, God velikogo pereloma: Khronika nachala 30-kh godov (The Year of the Great Turn: Chronicle of the Early 1930s, 1989-1994; 1994). Hailed by the right-wing critics, it portrayed collectivization and the massive arrests, disenfranchisement, and exile of peasants as an anti-Russian and anti-Christian conspiracy. Here is a quote from the second paragraph, stylized as a chronicle penned by a monk: “In the summer of 1929. . .the son of a Grodno pharmacist Iakov Arkad’evich Epshtein (Iakovlev) was appointed in the Moscow Kremlin a Commissar over all Christians and peasants [nad vsemi khristiany i zemlepashtsy].” The ending borrows from the Orthodox liturgy, uses an Old Russian instrumental case of the noun “khristianin” (a Christian), and plays on the fact that in Old Russian the word for peasant, “krest’ianin” was sometimes used in place of the word for Christian, “khristianin.” Belov treats collectivization as a Jewish plot, masterminded by Lev Trotsky and executed by Jewish Bolsheviks. The Jews are linked with satanic forces—a motif one also finds in other Russian fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, including Leonid Leonov’s last novel Piramida [The Pyramid]. The Jewish minister of agriculture Iakovlev carries in his briefcase pages “strewn with those signs of Satan which programmed the life, or rather the death, of millions of people.” Iakovlev’s committee on collectivization is referred to jocularly as “zloveshchii sinklit,” roughly an “ominous gathering.” An Orthodox priest Father Perovskii says to a mid-level Jewish official in charge of collectivization: “You have risen against Christ. And that is why you are the Antichrist.” Later the priest asks the Commissar, “Why do you hate Christianity so much?” thereby affirming the familiar anti-Semitic idea that collectivization was a markedly Jewish, messianic offensive against Russian peasants as Christians. Towards the end of the novel, writing of the Sixteenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, Belov sinks to the basest kind of defamatory anti-Semitism by grossly distorting the number of Jewish delegates and Jewish members. Here is a characteristic quote that precedes a list of Jewish-sounding last names: “The compilers of the lists of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission still knew the Russian alphabet.” In Belov’s novel Stalin speaks of the Jews as “the mightiest force in the party” and refers to Lazar Kaganovich, the only Jewish member of his Politburo in 1930, as “passionate Zionist.” The novel ends with a suggestion that the “devilish whirlwind” was only “testing its merciless forces,” promising a continuation of Belov’s anti-Semitic histrionics.

Finally, a brief mention should be made of Belov’s novel Vsë vperedi [All Is Yet to Come, 1987]. A weak imitation of the language and style of Soviet urban novelists, mainly Iurii Trifonov and Daniil Granin, this work further testifies to Belov’s unwillingness to explore the roots of the Jewish question. The main subject is Jewish emigration, which is presented as a threat to Russian nationhood. Belov makes use of a number of myths that are familiar to historians of intolerance, including the myth that the male members of a minority (Jews) desire women of the religious or ethnic majority (Russians) in whose midst they live. One of the protagonists, a Jewish engineer Mikhail Brish, pines after his former classmate Liuba, a Russian beauty married to another former classmate, a talented experimental engineer Medvedev. The novel begins with a trip to Paris in 1974, where Brish tries to manipulate a Jewish friend into having a sexual affair with Liuba so that it would create a rift between her and her husband. They make a bet, and a bottle of White Horse whiskey is the wager. The tritely apocalyptic white horse (from Revelation 19:11) resurfaces several times throughout the novel and presumably symbolizes how the West and the Jews have joined forces to corrupt the Russian family. A rather clumsily plotted explosion in the lab results in Medvedev’s arrest and exile, and Brish soon takes his place at work. He also replaces him at home by marrying Liuba and adopting Medvedev’s two children. The novel’s second part is set in 1984, as Medvedev resurfaces in his children’s lives while Brish contemplates emigration to America. Several anti-Semitic ideas are invoked by the narrator and in the dialogues between Medvedev and Ivanov, an alcoholic substance-abuse specialist resurrected from Belov’s early prose. In particular, vile and despicable things are openly proclaimed about Judaism as a religion that allegedly “permits to kill members of other confessions.” Ivanov preaches to Medvedev about the existence of “a mighty, organized, malevolent and secret force” that acts by “dividing and ruling”—a formulation almost word for word from the Protocols. Brish’s manipulations are made into an allegory of what the Jews do to the Russians. Ivanov points out to Medvedev that “in order to destroy a people. . .it is enough to divide the children and the parents, to turn the women against the men.” At the very end of the book, Ivanov warns his friend that Brish is intent on leaving the country and taking with him both his Russian wife and his adopted Russian children: “When you make a decision, they will be in Arkansas [not a very likely place for a Soviet Jew to emigrate to] or something like that. You have betrayed your children!” Advancing an unequivocally political and nationalist cause, this novel truly marked the aesthetic decline of the Village Prose in the late 1980s.

. . .

In the third—and final—knot of the Èidel’man-Astaf’ev correspondence, the Russian-Jewish historian made a seminal pronouncement on the destiny of a writer who embarks on a path of anti-Semitism: “Our argument. . .is very simply resolved: if you can still write well, or even better, while also keeping intact your present way of thinking, then you are right. But you will not be able to. You will follow the example of [Vasilii] Belov, who has so overcome his own gift with malevolence that he has learned to write perfectly talentless prose. . . .” This, to my mind, is the highest point of the entire exchange. It has been noted—by Iu. Karabchievskii and others—that in his first letter Èidel’man appears too charitable towards Astaf’ev, overlooking the obvious fact that in his “honesty” about and his “aching” for Russia (these are Èidel’man’s words), Astaf’ev makes no attempt to understand his Jewish compatriots, treating them consistently as threatening aliens. Be this as it may, Èidel’man is absolutely right in his final judgment about the destinies of Russian village writers.

Village Writers brought their aesthetic decline upon themselves by subscribing to a vehemently anti-Semitic narrative of Russian and Soviet history. While allowing themselves to be manipulated by career anti-Semites such as the critic Vadim Kozhinov or the poet and publicist Stanislav Kuniaev, the Village Writers had nearly strangled the artists within themselves by the middle of the 1980s. It was inevitable that they would channel anti-Semitic ideas through interviews and other discursive public statements, committing the writer’s greatest mistake by making politics their literature. Ironically, despite their insistence on the artist’s responsibility for maintaining his nation’s memory (pamiat’), their statements on the Jewish question reveal a complete indifference to—but surely not an ignorance of—the incessant anti-Semitism of the Soviet system from the first postwar decade to the late 1980s. Clearly, not every silence constitutes an act of endorsement. In this case, by blaming the Jews for the decline of the Russian village and traditional Russian Orthodox culture, while simultaneously refusing to treat the Jews with the same honesty as they have the ethnic Russians, the Village Writers have endorsed both popular and state-sponsored anti-Semitic practices of the Soviet period. They have, one might add, paid a price for the choices they made by becoming a marginal segment of post-Soviet Russian culture.

Thinking of the decline of the Russian Village Prose in the mid-1980s, one is reminded of the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose 1948 book Qu’est-ce que la littérature? [What is Literature? 1948], still remains one of the most important explorations of intolerance in literature. Speaking of the writer’s freedom and responsibility in connection with racism, Sartre said this: “Thus, I require of all freedoms that they demand the liberation of colored people against the white race and against myself insofar as I am a part of it, but nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism.”

Copyright ©2000 by Maxim D. Shrayer.  All rights reserved.