ABSTRACT
This chapter draws comparisons between the nostalgia expressed by lifelong villagers in academically curated oral accounts and the nostalgia found in literary works whose writers sought to remember the same time and place. The tradition of Russian Village Prose (1956–1984) was nostalgic for a “radiant past”; nostalgia subsequently (1985–1995) took a darker, more political, turn in assigning guilt for the destruction of the countryside. The new millennium brought the passing of the last important Village Prose writers but also marked the advent of new resources (texts, analyses, oral history) for rural studies. Compilations of writers’ correspondence, essays, and stories—writings previously unpublished or scattered among newspapers and journals—have recently become available. This additional material includes rich reflections on childhood, married life, work, and local culture, some of them surprisingly wistful, even about the 1930s. However, these records seem, if anything, much less political than Village Prose itself.
