A Soviet Writer Above Ground

...The craftsman of "The Master," wanting funds to hire a crew to help him restore the church, is shunted from village priest to district metropolitan to Regional Executive Committee, only to be told in the end that the building, beautiful as it is, is merely a copy of a contemporary Vladimir church and therefore "not worth" restoring The would-be assassin of Hitler, whose life is given meaning by his fantasies, is repeatedly called before the village Soviet to be chastised for his "distortions of history ". Whatever shape authority takes, it is out to straitjacket these figures, to push them into conforming, to limit their horizons and confine them to the conventional, acceptable, ordinary patterns of life Occasionally their despair becomes so great that there is nothing left for them to do but die, and several of them (most unusually for Soviet literature) commit suicide, either directly or by voluntarily meeting their deaths...

...Much of the material here is excellent The translations done by Geoffrey Hosking, an English scholar who also contributed the Introduction and the bibliography, particularly manage to capture Shukshin's combination of laconic and poetic narrative Some of the other translations are rather weak, unfortunately, the worst being two pieces that involve heavy use of slang or dialect "A Storey," translated by James Nelson, dealing with a barely literate truckdriver's attempt to write about his wife's infidelity, and "The Bastard," translated by George Gutsche, which at times hardly makes sense (Gutsche is responsible, too, for infelicitously rendering into English a critical article by Michael Heller ). In all fairness, though, it should be noted that such failures are perhaps inevitable Some of Shukshin's characters, like the truckdriver hero of "The Storey," are barely literate, and the further down the social scale one goes, the more difficult the task of finding the proper idiom English simply lacks a commonly accepted substandard norm that does not transpose a lower-class, uneducated Russian into an Appalachian miner or a slum black The one solution might have been avoiding the inclusion of stories where such language plays an important role In any case, more annotation would have been helpful Readers without knowledge of Russian may not know, for instance, what kalgan vodka is, and even those conversant with Soviet history might appreciate a note defining kulak...

...My single other complaint is about the title piece, "Snowball Berry Red," among Shukshin's most popular and the one on which he based his Lenin Prize-winning film In this case, the trouble is not so much the translation-done by Fiene and tor the most part very readable-but the story itself Despite several powerful passages, I find the characters too broadly drawn The hero's girlfriend is a case in point Unlike nearly all of Shukshin's women, Lyuba is kindly Neither shrew nor siren, she helps, comforts and loves her man Her reason for being so warm and compassionate, however, is never made clear Her actions and emotions are insufficiently motivated, making her unconvincing...

...The Party doesn't figure at all, nor does religion, unless it be the sort of amalgamated theism preached by a fellow who, loaded to the gills with vodka, dances around chanting "I believe in aviation, in the mechanization of agriculture, in the scientific revolution, in space and weightlessness I believe that soon everyone will gather in huge stinking cities I believe that they will suffocate there and rush back to the open fields I believe in badger grease, the bull's horn, and the standing shaft' In bodily flesh and muscle...

...Among the best of these was Vasily Shukshin, who, by the time of his death at age 45 in 1974 had combined careers as an actor, film director and writer, and won acclaim in all three Up to a point, he can be grouped with the derevenchiki-the ruralists," who describe village Russians uncorrupted by urban values, holding fast to a simpler and more honest way of life In this tradition, dating back at least as far as Tolstoy, the peasant is seen as a repository of faith, wisdom and ideals unclouded by intellectual obfuscation or middle-class pretensions...

...There can be no doubt of the high regard Soviet readers have for Shukshin As for why their regard is indulged, no one in the West can be sure Certainly Shukshin, a Party member, was never involved in any open dissident activity that we know of, and his work does not criticize the political status quo A certain degree of "societal" criticism from within is tolerated, and where the lines are drawn is a combination of extra-literary elements, fortuity, connections, and more Whatever, Shukshin was an extremely talented writer Russians are lucky that he is allowed to be published in the USSR, and we are equally lucky that, now, he is published here...

...As well as he knows his outsiders, Shukshin knows the frustration of living in a society-any society-that has little or no room for such men Comedy and tragedy mix when the dreamers confront, voluntarily or willy-nilly, authority...

...A Soviet Writer Above Ground Snowball Berry Red & Others By Vastly Shukshin Ardis 253 pp $13 95 Reviewed by Josephine Woll Lecturer in Russian literature, Howard University NOT ALL the literary talent in the Soviet Union hides underground Not all the good books there circulate only in manuscript, stealthily and at great risk to writer and reader alike We in the West, in our zeal to pay deserved tribute to persecuted authors, too often overlook unquestionably gifted writers who get published-because their subject matter is apolitical, or because their extra-literary devotion gives them a broader margin of freedom, or because their work touches chords in important members of the publishing apparat, or simply because it provides a harmless, albeit necessary outlet for popular ideas and feelings...

...But however alien this particular dilemma is to us, we have no trouble recognizing his characters Shukshin writes about marginal men, whose reach ever exceeds their grasp There is, for instance, the young man who wants to work for more than just a full belly, without being able to pinpoint precisely what more it is he wants And there is the village ne'er-do-well, who leads parties of visiting hunters into the woods and weaves them a fairy-tale of how he tried to assassinate Hitler The hunger of Shukshin's outcasts for magic and for freedom cannot be sated, except temporarily by vodka or tale-spinning Indeed, almost every one of his protagonists has a gift-or, as society regards it, a weakness-for invention This may take the form of telling stones, or writing songs, or reciting poetry, or-as in one lovely piece in this collection, "The Master"-recognizing the genius of a 17th-century church architect...

...Yet as this initial collection of his work in English demonstrates, Shukshin does not glorify the peasantry or village life, as do most ruralists His imagination was tempered by the social upheavals of the last 40 years collectivization, war, industrialization, urbanization He himself was born in Siberia, worked on a collective farm and on town building sites, served in the Navy, and only at the age of 25 settled m Moscow He knew first-hand the feeling of being in limbo between cultures, between town and country He described it as "having one leg on the shore and the other in a boat You can't stay where you are, but you're afraid to jump into the boat " The heroes of his stories, novellas and film-scripts are by and large in the same uncomfortable position, one that may not be very familiar to Americans, since the urban-rural gap here is far smaller than in the USSR...

...This collection brought out by Ardis -publishers of some of the best recent Russian writing, both sanctioned and samizdat-is a fair sampling of Shukshin's preoccupations and literary ability Edited by Donald Fiene, professor of Russian literature at the University of Tennessee, the volume contains 11 short stories, the filmscript novella "Snowball Berry Red,' three critical articles, a chronology of the writer's life and works, a filmography, and a bibliography...

...In his critical article, Fiene argues that Lyuba symbolizes idealized Russia and the Virgin Mary She reminds me of the cliche heroines of Hollywood gangster movies This did not prevent the film version from becoming a tremendous hit in the USSR...

...A writer who manages to win the approval of both the Establishment and the people is a relatively uncommon phenomenon in any country And while Michael Heller, in his excellent essay here, says in effect that the author's official acceptability was greatly enhanced by his death, Shukshin did publish continually, from about 1960 until he died I might add that in Moscow this summer I searched fruitlessly for a copy of his stories Finally, someone went to great trouble and sent her own copy of the two-volume edition printed after Shukshin's death via the overnight freight-train to Moscow The official price is about two rubles The black market price, I learned, was 40 rubles, about a third of an average worker's monthly salary...

...That they live in villages rather than cities does not lessen their burden Shukshin's heroes may not be as money-grubbing as their urban brothers-in-law, but their wives usually are They may be more admirable than bureaucratic pen-pushers, but not because they find their answers in "honest" labor, plowing the fields or milking the cows Family life isn't enough Children (often alluded to, though rarely present in the stories) give joy, wives almost never do, being anxious to pull their husbands firmly down to earth and fence them around with furniture, shawls, relatives, demands...