On the Move

This summer I’m doing archival research in Moscow, Russia, and Almaty, Kazakhstan, to gather material for my dissertation. The topic I’m working on right now—I have six more months until I have to actually commit it to paper in the form of a prospectus!—is the impact of rapid urbanization on Soviet society and culture in the decades after World War II. Over the course of the twentieth century, the societies that made up the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union went from being overwhelmingly agrarian to predominantly urban. Millions of people went from living in small communities of wooden houses and working the land to living in big cities of high-rise apartments and working in factories and offices. The project I am envisioning right now examines how this dramatic experience of mobility, both physical and social, played out in the sphere of culture in fields such as literature and the preservation of historic landmarks.

One area where former peasants made their voices heard the loudest was literature. A group of Russian writers, all born in villages, began writing about their village backgrounds in a movement that was dubbed “village prose” by literary critics. Starting in the mid-1950s and gaining momentum in the 1960s, these authors wrote about issues affecting rural life in a lyrical style that struck a chord with millions of readers who had undergone many of the same experiences. Their fictional works, highly critical of the Soviet management of agriculture, were embraced by both reformists who sought to liquidate the legacies of Stalinism in Soviet life and conservatives who advocated a return to the traditional Russian values of the countryside.

Valentin Rasputin

The literary style itself petered out by the end of the 1970s, but Russian village prose writers remained some of the most popular writers in Russia into the early 1980s. When Mikhail Gorbachev loosened censorship restrictions, many of the submerged political currents came to the surface. One group of village prose writers, including Valentin Rasputin and Vasily Belov, became associated with the far-right, anti-Semitic Russian nationalism during perestroika while another group, including Sergei Zalygin, sided with the reformists. There is a tendency today to read political polemics into village prose of the 1960s and 1970s; for me, it’s much more interesting to understand what the writers were trying to say about the experience of being uprooted from one place and having to make a life in a new and alien environment.

It was with this background information in my head that I came to Valentin Rasputin’s 1976 novel, Farewell to Matyora, probably the most famous work of village prose. “Farewell to Matyora is, next to Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and ‘Matryona’s Home,’ the most important work of literature written and published in the Soviet Union between Stalin’s death in 1953 and the beginning of glasnost in 1985,” writes Russian literary scholar Kathleen Parthé. The book tells the story of an elderly woman who is forced to abandon her home because the construction of a new hydroelectic dam will result in the flooding of the small Siberian village in which she lives. The novel chronicles the villagers’ attempts to come to terms with the obliteration of their homes and their forced resettlement to a larger, more modern town.

The novel has many strikingly lyrical passages, and this one really made an impression on me as I was reading it on the T in Boston a few days before leaving for Russia. In the pages preceding this, Rasputin describes the villagers’ last harvest in Matyora.

“They would harvest and take away the hay, and the cows would eat the last blade by spring, but the songs after work when it seemed that it wasn’t them singing, not people but their very souls uniting into one—they believed so deeply and with holy fervor in the simple lyrics and raised their voices so strong and united—that sweet and troubling awe in the evening before the beauty and horror of the coming night, when you no longer remember who you are and where you are, when it seems that you’re gliding silently and smoothly above the earth, barely moving your wings and following a blessed path revealed to you, acutely aware of everything that floats below; that quiet profound ache that appears from nowhere, the ache that comes when you realize that you didn’t even know yourself until this very minute, didn’t know that you were more than what you carry within you, that you were also what surrounds you, the ache that isn’t always noticed and is sometimes more terrible to lose than an arm or a leg—all this would be remembered for a long time and remain in their souls as un unsettling light and joy." —Farewell to Matyora, Valentin Rasputin, trans. Antonina W. Bouis, pg. 115

I was reading that at the same time as I was moving out of the apartment where I had lived for two years. Two years in an apartment is nothing compared to an entire lifetime in a Siberian village, but I still felt weird when I handed the keys over to the new tenants, knowing that after that moment I could no longer go back to the place where I had eaten, slept, cooked, and studied for the last two years. Overall I was happy to leave the place behind—we had endured three weeks of barely functioning heat in that apartment in February—but when I read the passage above, I understood exactly what Rasputin meant by “the quiet profound ache that appears from nowhere.”

The idea that in some way our surroundings form a part of our identity isn’t one that we encounter much these days. It’s much easier to think of pop culture narratives in which the intrepid hero or heroine sets off to conquer the big city than stories in which the protagonist stays put. Whether we’re living in late capitalism or late socialism like Rasputin’s villagers, it seems that moving around is an inevitable part of life. It’s rare to find art that describes the experience of staying home. 

Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is the Canadian folk-punk band the Weakerthans, who write odes to the open prarie from the unglamourous post-industrial city of Winnipeg. They’re the only band I’ve ever known to write a song about moving, which could have been the anthem of the last week in May for me.

Watch this video for some grade-A Canadian accents.

“Now that the furniture's returning to its Goodwill home

With dishes and last week's paper

Rumors and elections,

Crosswords, our unending wars

The black on our fingers smeared the ink on every door pulled shut

Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damage deposit

Take this moment to decide

If we meant it, if we tried…”

I’d be the first to agree that a right-wing Russian writer and a left-wing Canadian singer don’t have much in common, but all the same I’m struck by the similarities in their approaches to place and displacement. Their melancholy odes to the joys and pains of feeling connected to a certain place in the modern world certainly resonated with me as I moved out of my apartment and flew off to live in a different country for the next two months.

This is my temporary home in Russia.

Stay tuned for more dispatches!