SHRAYER
475
Russian village life. In the mid-1970S, due in part
to
the growing activ–
ities of the Russian ultra-nationalist movement within the Soviet cul–
tural 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 Russ–
ian village as the backbone of Russian life, turning Russia into a secu–
lar 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 media–
tor," to employ Rene 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 Vil–
lage 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 con–
fusion 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 repre–
sentatives 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
