The Mother Theme in Valentin Rasputin

In the early 1980s two Russian critics, once leading figures in the world of letters in the Soviet Union and now living in emigration, crossed swords over the state of Russian today. They were Yurii MaFtsev and Andrei Siniavskii, and the topic of their disagreement was, to use Maftsev's term, intermediate literature (promezhutochnaia literatura), works published officially in the Soviet Union which were light years away from hack writing, yet whose authors enjoyed the status, privileges, and indeed acclaim accorded many a conformist. MaFtsev cited Trifonov, Abramov, Belov, Astafiev, Mozhaev, Shukshin, Rasputin, and Tendriakov as good examples. In his article MaFtsev was in effect continuing arguments found in his book Vol'naia russkaia literatura,2 namely that only undergroundand hence dissident emigre was genuine literature, and that Western observers, not knowing the Soviet Union at first hand, were not in a position to appreciate what was true and what was false in Russian literature. Intermediate writers, he argued in his article, are ostensibly continuers of the Russian realist tradition, but somehow fail to live up to it. The essence of the tradition of Russian realism is not in verisimilitude

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