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.
Read more about Village Prose: See Also
Famous quotes containing the words village and/or prose:
“To fair Fidele’s grassy tomb
Soft maids and village hinds shall bring
Each opening sweet of earliest bloom,
And rifle all the breathing spring.”
—William Collins (1721–1759)
“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement ... says heaven and earth in one word ... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.”
—Christopher Fry (b. 1907)