ABOUT THIS BOOK

A fine example of Village Prose from the post-Stalin era, Farewell to Matyora decries the loss of the Russian peasant culture to the impersonal, soulless march of progress.

It is the final summer of the peasant village of Matyora. A dam will be completed in the fall, destroying the village. Although their departure is inevitable, the characters over when, and even whether, they should leave. A haunting story with a heartfelt theme, Farewell to Matyora is a passionate plea for humanity and an eloquent cry for a return to an organic life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

VALENTINE RASPUTIN (1937–2015) was a Russian writer. He was born and lived much of his life in the Irkutsk Oblast in Eastern Siberia. Rasputin's works depict rootless urban characters and the fight for survival of centuries-old traditional rural ways of life. Rasputin covered complex questions of ethics and spiritual revival.

KATHLEEN PARTHÉ is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Rochester and the author of Russian Village Prose.

ANTONINA W. BOUIS has translated numerous novels and plays from the Russian.

REVIEWS

"Farewell to Matyora is, next to Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and 'Matryona's Home,' the most important work of literature written and published in the Soviet Union between Stalin's death in 1953 and the beginning of glasnost in 1985." —Kathleen Parthé

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"Remarkable. . . . Rasputin is the kind of writer of whom Chekhov, that most sensible of all Russian writers, would have approved—a man linked to the soil through its people, apolitical without being nihilistic, profoundly humane." —Christian Science Monitor

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by Kathleen Parthé
Farewell to Matyora

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