Shamanism and Animistic Personification in the Writings of Valentin Rasputin

At least since Turgenev's conferral on Tolstoi of the title great writer of the Russian land, writers in Russia have aspired to transcend the status of storyteller in order to serve as a conscience for their nation. After Dostoevskii's speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in 1880, the crowd cheered him with shouts of Prophet! (prorok). One can scarcely imagine such an event occurring in our West. In recent times Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's name comes to mind in this connection, but there is no shortage of competitors for Tolstoi's emblematic peasant blouse. With the possible exception of Solzhenitsyn, probably no Russian writing today carries out the function of prophet with greater conviction and a larger popular following than Valentin Rasputin. In fiction and in publicistic writings Rasputin has taken on himself the tasks of defining for Russians of the present day the essence of their national selfhood and pointing out the path leading to their salvation as a people. The extent to which Rasputin has succeeded in these aims may be judged by his appointment by Mikhail Gorbachev to serve in the first presidential cabinet of ten advisors, among whom Rasputin was the sole non-Communist and most certainly the only practicing Christian. Rasputin's appointment to this high office and his selection as a member of the Soviet parliament was widely seen as a sop to Russian nationalist extremism. Eventually Rasputin's allegiance to nationalist and anti-foreign doctrines led him to lend support to the August 20, 1991, putsch, which in turn resulted in calls for his removal as a secretary of the Soviet Writers' Union.! Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Rasputin has written frequently for organs of extreme nationalism, including the literary journal Our Contemporary (Nash sovremennik) and the newspaper Day (Den ). In this study it will be argued that Rasputin, in carrying out the functions of seer and spiritual leader, has adopted the guise of the stock hierophant among the indigenous peoples of Rasputin's native Siberia-the shaman.2 It will further be argued that Rasputin's artistic writing is suffused with the shaman's view of the world as a place where the living commune with the dead and the objects of nature are active participants in an all-encompassing and panvitalistic world of spirits. It should be pointed out here that the word shaman is not applied to Rasputin with quite the latitude given the term in recent applications to

Art · Shamanism · Theology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Soviet and Russian History