Village Prose (Russian: Деревенская проза, or Деревенская литература) was a movement in Soviet literature beginning during the Khrushchev Thaw, which included works that focused on the Soviet rural communities. Some point to the critical essays on collectivization in Novyi mir by Valentin Ovechkin as the starting point of Village Prose, though most of the subsequent works associated with the genre are fictional novels and short stories. Authors associated with Village Prose include Aleksander Yashin, Vasily Belov, Fyodor Abramov, Valentin Rasputin, Boris Mozhayev, Vasily Shukshin. Some critics also count Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn among the Village Prose writers for his short novel Matryona's House.
Many Village Prose works espoused an idealized picture of traditional Russian village life and became increasingly associated with Russian nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Some have argued that the nationalist subtext of Village Prose is the reason the Soviet government remained supportive of Village Prose writers like Valentin Rasputin (who became a member of the Writers' Union) during the Time of Stagnation, even while they began to more heavily censor other dissenting movements, like Youth and Urban Prose.
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Famous quotes containing the words village and/or prose:
“Where village statesmen talked with looks profound,
And news much older than their ale went round.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)