ABSTRACT
The literary village and its inhabitants achieved a much higher and more politicized profile than did cities and urban dwellers, factories and workers, or battlefields and soldiers — other familiar settings and characters in Soviet Russian literature from the early fifties to the mid-eighties. There is a surprising variety in the responses to this new direction in rural literature that — contrary to the tenets of socialist realism and the ethos of Soviet life — privileged the past, old people, village life, spiritual depth, eccentricity, traditional ways, and a strong Russian national identity. There are a number of distinct areas of Russia represented in derevenskaia proza, for example, the central regions of Vladimir and Orel, and the far North of Arkhangelsk and Pomor’e. But it is the Siberian village and the Siberian expanse as a whole which figure most prominently as emblems of the nation, rapidly acquiring a political function in the paraliterary space that came to surround Village Prose.
