SHRAYER
479
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 Eidel'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 Eidel'man and the scan–
dal 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 char–
acters, including a Jewish captain in the military police
(Prokliaty i ubity
[The Damned and the Killed,
1992]). At the same time, he has made rec–
onciliatory 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 neu–
tralized 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 vil–
lages, 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 Materoi
[Farewell to Matera,
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.
