Enjoyable ‘Socialist realism’

Press, 18 April 1981, Page 17

Enjoyable ‘Socialist realism’

Money for Maria and Borrowed Time. By Valentin Rasputin.. Translated by Margaret WettHn and Kevin Windle. University of Queensland Press, 1981. 374 pp. $18.70. .

(Reviewed by

John Goodliffe)

This volume is the third in the series“ Contemporary Russian Writing,” published with the assistance of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. The University of Queensland deserves commendation for its enterprise in publishing Soviet Literature which is not of the usual “dissident” variety. Too often Western publishers and readers tend to assume that if a work is -published officially in.the Soviet Union, it cannot possibly have any merit, and, conversely, that if the Soviet authorities refuse to publish it, it is bound to be a masterpiece. These two stories by Valentin Rasputin (no connection with his • infamous namesake), born in Siberia in 1937, were first published in the U.S.S.R. in 1967 and 1970. They demonstrate that, although Party policy on literature has continued to be shaped by the concept of “socialist realism,” this no longer means what it used to, mean in the days when Soviet stories about life down on the collective farm were of the Boy meets Girl meets Tractor variety, witty happy Heroes and Heroines of Labour guided towards a Bright Future by the All-Wise Stalin. In' “Money for Maria,” Kuzma, a collective-farm worker, is on a train journey. A deficit of 1000 roubles has been discovered during stocktaking at the village store run by his wife..To,save her from disgrace Kuzma has tried, without much success, to raise temporary loans from various people in the village. Now he is going to try his luck with his brother in the city. In “Borrowed Time” the surviving children of an. illiterate old countrywoman assemble at her death-bed. But she does not die as soon as they expect and they are forced to spend an uneasy waiting period together. Her two sons pass much of the time’getting drunk on the vodka bought for the funeral feast. The relationship between her two daughters and her daUghter-in-law becomes continually more strained. The youngest daughter, living in distant Kiev, never arrives. These slender plots are ideal for Rasputin’s purpose of portraying a range of interesting characters — the retired village schoolmaster and the collectivefarm chairman whose apparent willingness to help Kuzma is revealed as superficial; the old couple and the young

drunk he meets on the train. The characters of old Anna’s children in “Borrowed Time” have been conditioned by the degree of urbanisation to which they have been exposed. Mikhail, the chief vod'ka swiller, has never left his native village. The others live in town nr city and their varying reactions to village life reveal much about it and themselves. The dichotomy between town and country is a perennial phenomenon, especially striking ,in the Soviet Union. Rasputin does not gloss over the more sordid aspects of Soviet rural life. Touches of romanticism are to be found only in his vivid descriptions of the landscape. The structure and style of his stories show him to be a literary craftsman of the highest order and, although much of the peasant flavour of his characters’ speech is lost in the English version, his translators have coped more .than adequately with their difficult task.