Farewell to Matyora (European Classics)

Farewell to Matyora depicts the picturesque peasant's paradise (in the eye of the beholder) where a commune of peasants has lived and worked from as far back as their memory can harken, and then farther still. However, the reality of the construction of a hydroelectric dam downstream and the inevitable flooding of their island home steadily creeps in upon the consciousness of the villagers. Rasputin's masterpiece of Village Prose tracks this progression of increasing awareness of the approaching fate and the disparaging ways in which the villagers cope with, as well as bid their goodbyes to their beloved home and are forced into the city. A definitive story of the time and a true homage to the fleeting village life.

Beautifully written. There's a magical realism element to this story that took me to places I didn't expect to go. I don't know too much about Russian history, but it spoke to me of how the life of the Russian peasant didn't change much from the time of the Tsars to the time of the Soviets. I think the author knew his subjects well and wrote with authority. He bared the souls of his characters and in the process opened their lives to me. I haven't read much Russian fiction but will be doing so in the future.

This is a book I liked for sentimental reasons about Communist Russia in the twentieth century.

A lovely way to introduce one to Russian novelists

Farewell to Matyora is an exceptionally beautiful and poignant novel. A story about one of those Russian villages flooded when Russia built a series of hydro-electric dams under Stalin, Valentin Rasputin's book is composed of the remembrances of Darya and a few other elderly villagers facing their last summer in their ancestral home. The tale is deeply affecting (Darya's distress at not being able to move the graves of her ancestors at the end will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who has recently lost someone), and the scene of her in the graveyard on the last night, as well as the one of her cleaning and whitewashing her house on its last day, is almost unbearably moving. This book goes on that very short list of my 5-10 favorite books of all time.

It was so dull that I can't remember if there was violence - I think not. No sex that I remember. Wasn't first person I think. I tried it because of the NYTimes Review. Silly Me!

The writer Valentin Rasputin was widely regarded as the leading light of "village prose", a movement in post-war Russian literature which concentrated on the life of the Soviet peasantry and often painted an idealised picture of traditional village life. As Kathleen Parthe, the translator of this edition, points out in her foreword, official Soviet literature often defined progress in terms of man’s victory over nature, and of the rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and mechanisation of society. “Village prose” can be seen as a reaction against this trend. In “Farewell to Matyora” the fictional title village stands upon an island in the river Angara in Siberia. The island is due to be flooded and the village destroyed because a hydroelectric dam is being constructed further downstream. The writers of the official Soviet literature mentioned in the previous paragraph would doubtless have concentrated on the men constructing the dam and treated them as heroes of Soviet Communism building a better future for the people; if they had mentioned the destruction of Matyora at all it would have been only in passing as a minor price that had to be paid for progress. As the old cliche, beloved of apologists for Communism, has it, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Rasputin takes the opposite point of view, concentrating on the broken eggs rather than the omelette. He pays little attention to the dam-builders, concentrating on the people of Matyora who face the loss of the only home they have ever known; for the most part they resent this development, but know that they are powerless to prevent it. Their response is to carry on living their traditional lifestyle, which dates back to a period long before the Revolution, for as long as possible until the very last minute. The book ends with the departure of the Master, the mysterious genius loci or guardian spirit of Matyora. I read this book because I had seen Rasputin described as the “heir to Solzhenitsyn”, an author I have long admired, but in fact there are important differences between the two writers, although both wrote from a broadly Russian nationalist viewpoint. Under Soviet rule Rasputin was not regarded as a dissident like Solzhenitsyn, even if he sometimes impliedly criticised the system. "Farewell to Matyora" was quite openly published in the Soviet Union in 1976 during the Brezhnev era, and no move was made by the authorities to ban it. (At this period Solzhenitsyn was living in exile, and nothing written by him could be published in his home country). Rasputin is clearly critical of the fictitious dam project in the novel (In real life he was an environmental activist who criticised similar dam projects). Such criticism, however, did not automatically imply criticism of the Soviet system itself, as similar projects were undertaken in Western countries. Several villages in Britain, including Mardale Green in Cumbria and Derwent in Derbyshire, have been destroyed to create new reservoirs. There are also stylistic differences between the two. Solzhenitsyn’s characters are predominantly male; indeed, in some novels such as “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, set in a men’s gulag, they are exclusively so. Many of the main characters in “Farewell to Matyora”, however, are female, mostly elderly women whom Rasputin treats as the principal guardians of village tradition. (Many of their husbands, and sometimes their sons too, perished in the war). Solzhenitsyn concentrated more on characterisation; Rasputin’s do not really live in the memory, and his various old ladies seem more or less mutually interchangeable. The most memorable figure her his the minor one of Bogodul, a tramp of unknown origins and nationality- the villagers believe him to be a Pole- who only speaks a few words of Russian, notably “kurva”. (Literally “prostitute”, but used in Russian as an all-purpose swear word). One of Rasputin’s major themes is nature, and man’s relationship with nature, and there are many lyrical descriptions of the Siberian landscapes in the different seasons of the year. Nature is not a major theme in the works of Solzhenitsyn and there are fewer descriptive passages in his works. Rasputin’s lyricism reminded me more of the prose of English ruralist writers such as Hardy, Bates, D H Lawrence and Henry Williamson. The parallels with Lawrence and Williamson seem particularly close because those writers also distrusted the impact of industrialisation, which they saw as destroying the organic link between man and nature. The peasants of Matyora live in harmony with nature; the dam-builders see it as something to be conquered. Its message of the book is that this harmony is something to be cherished and that we threaten it at our peril.