VALENTIN RASPUTIN (1937–2015) was a patriarch of the so-called village prose writers who emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1960s to address moral and environmental issues and depict the remains of a rural Russia about to be consumed by industrialization. Among his best-selling works is the 1976 novel Farewell to Matyora (Northwestern University Press, 1995) about an island village on the Angara River that is about to be subsumed in the 1960s by construction of the Bratsk hydroelectric plant and the elderly residents who resist resettlement. He served in the Congress of People’s Deputies from 1989 to 1990.

"Rasputin's work opens up to the reader a land and a people who are, on the one hand, cruel, harsh, and cold as a Siberian winter and, on the other hand, as tender, warm, and gentle as a Siberian spring." —Choice— -

"[Rasputin's] books are full of real people with real human conflicts." —Library Journal — -

"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." —The Christian Science Monitor — -