SHRAYER
481
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-Iate
1990S
he abstained from making overt anti-Jewish state–
ments, 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 dimin–
ished 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 pub–
lication of the short novel
Privychnoe delo [The Usual Thing,
1966]
made him instantly famous. The Russian nationalist wing of the Writ–
ers' Union targeted him as one of their spokesmen, and exaggerated his
talent and originality in reviews. Vadim Kozhinov, the
eminence 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 Euro–
pean Russia. Combining elements of
skaz
narration with peasant and
kolkhoz
folklore, Belov's tales were an alternative to much of the for–
mulaic 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 patri–
otism 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 tem–
porarily 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.
