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The Peasant As Writer
10.01.2007 09:32
The Moscow News/ 40 number/ 2002
This week we have another 70th birthday. It is celebrated on October 23 by Vasily Belov, one of the most controversial writers of the "rural prose" school which emerged in the 1960s in the Soviet Union. Vasily Belov was born in a Vologda village in 1932, at the height of collectivization, to a peasant family, one of five children.
His village was 50 miles from the district seat. The future writer lived through the grim war years, when hunger was part of life on the collective farms and elsewhere. His father was killed in the war. Belov would later write a story about his childhood experiences which gives us an idea of what life was like in those years.
Since most of the men from the villages were at the front, children grazed the herd of privately owned village cows. It was the turn of 12-year-old Vasily, and he drove the cows to an enclosure in the forest intended for cattle grazing. The boy beat a piece of cast iron hanging from a tree to keep wild animals away. All he had to eat was a potato pancake, and he felt hungry, so he visited a nearby raspberry patch. It was getting to be late when Vasily realized that he was lost in the woods, and the cows were nowhere to be seen. He kept walking for hours, but the forest only grew thicker. Finally he reached an animal path, then a forest road. It was dark when he saw two figures: they were two peasant women from the village returning home with basketfuls of berries. It turned out that he had been walking away from home, and, but for the women, his chances of survival would have been slim indeed. They begged him not to tell anyone that he had seen them, since going into the forest at harvest time was strictly prohibited. Back home, he learned that the cows had broken through the enclosure and damaged a field of wheat belonging to the collective farm. For this his mother, and the boy, too, for that matter, could be sent to the Gulag.
Having completed seven grades of village school, Vasily left for the city of Sokol, where he studied at a vocational school. The future writer worked as a carpenter (his father had also been a carpenter), then a motor-mechanic and electrician. He was drafted and served in the army. His path followed that of most peasants under the Soviet regime. From agriculture to industry, from village to city. Returning from the army, Belov settled in Vologda. He had joined the Communist Party in 1956 and contributed to the regional newspaper in Vologda. Under the Soviet regime, most village people were conformists by nature. Belov's common origins helped him publish his first works and enter the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow in 1959. Belov's early poetry, however, left no mark in Russian literature. Following his graduation from the Gorky Institute, Belov returned to the city of Vologda, where he continued writing. Incidentally, another writer of the rural prose school, Viktor Astafyev, also lived in Vologda.
It was Belov's prose, his stories published in the 1960s, that established his reputation as a writer of the rural prose school, in particular the story Usual Thing, published in 1966. But he is even better known for his Carpenter Stories, which appeared in 1968.
Belov wrote about the life he knew so well from his childhood, his heroes are village characters, ordinary people living ordinary lives. Vologda countryside had its peculiar culture; even its haystacks were of a different shape than those in the rest of Russia.
The rural prose school which Belov represented was the result of Russia's extraordinary historical development in the 20th century.
The Russian intelligentsia had discovered the common village folk in the 19th century, and the Populist (Narodniki) writers devoted their works to "the common people." However, the Populists were physically destroyed together with their legacy by the Communists who came to power in 1917.
As a result, the rural prose writers were able to start writing about the common folk afresh in the 1960s, without drawing on the legacy of the Russian Populists. This made their works more spontaneous but intellectually weak. Belov was no exception.
The fact that the rural prose writers did not refer to the Populists and steered clear of potentially dangerous subjects such as collectivization enabled them to keep out of the Communist political establishment's black books.
Belov bemoaned the gradual disintegration of the peasant world. But his idea of the traditional peasant way of life came from within; he could not rise above the peasant community, remaining basically a peasant in his world outlook, and even appearance, all his life.
Perhaps the greatest value of the works of the rural prose writers, including Belov, lay in their anthropological aspect, as a source for the study of peasant life and not as works of fiction. However, the rural prose school also had an important political dimension. By considering the lives of individual peasants Belov and his colleagues, probably even unwittingly at first, rejected the official stereotype of the cheerful collective farmer building a radiant future. Later, as we shall see, Belov will go further in his criticism of the collective farm system.
At the turn of the 1970s Belov wrote Education According to Doctor Spock, in which he described the adventures or rather misadventures of a village lad in the evil big city with its disintegration of families and alienation. In Lad (Harmony) Belov finally gave free rein to his propensity for the bucolic ideal. If we are to believe Belov, Russia's peasant communiy has achieved everything humanity could hope for. Whatever happened to the roughness and greed that are perhaps the most prominent traits of the peasant class?
In the novel Everything's Ahead, which came out in 1985, Belov considered the dialectics of town and village. In this book the author displayed a narrow-minded view of such complex issues as judging the West, the urban intelligentsia which, as he saw it, had lost the Russian mentality, and the relationship between the sexes.
Between 1972 and 1998, Belov wrote several novels devoted to the peasant consciousness during the bloody period of collectivization: Vigils, Year of the Great Turning Point, and The Sixth Hour. Even the titles of these books pointed to a strange mix of Biblical and Communist rhetoric. Belov even tried to introduce into the novels such figures as Stalin, Bukharin and Trotsky. On the whole, Belov certainly found himself treading on less solid ground in his attempts to write historical prose than when he described ordinary peasants.
Equally unsuccessful is an essay Belov wrote on literary plots. He assumes a condescending tone with regard to most Russian writers, criticizing the most prominent of them for the absence of good plots. This sounds naive at the least.
Like Gorky, Belov is a self-made man, but he lacks the goodwill that marked Gorky's attitude to most writers. Perhaps Belov's greatest shortcoming is his didactic approach to life. While living in a big city himself he seems to be urging readers to return to the village. This is a futile call, since the world Belov idealizes has to all intents and purposes ceased to exist.
The rural prose school in literature entered a period of crisis in the mid-1990s, and today it is virtually defunct. The religious and political search of its proponents, including Belov, does not seem very promising. Many of them have lapsed into anti-Semitism and rabid nationalism. From being the liberals of the 1960s, these writers have turned into the conservatives or even reactionaries of the 2000s.
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