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New York Times
December 3, 2001
Viktor Astafyev, Who Wrote of Rural Russia, Dies at 77
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
MOSCOW, Dec. 2 -- Viktor Astafyev, a writer who became famous for his stark novels about the Soviet Union's costly victory in the Second World War and grim narratives about prison camps and the alcoholism and despair of provincial Russian life, died on Thursday at home in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. He was 77.
The cause was reported to be a stroke. Mr. Astafyev had suffered a stroke in the spring and been seriously ill since then; he was hospitalized again in early November, but Russian television reported that he continued to work on the latest book in a trilogy titled "I Want to Survive."
Literary critics and cultural figures said today that Mr. Astafyev personified eras ranging from the conflict known here as the Great Patriotic War to Khrushchev's period of cultural thaw to the school of writing known as "village prose."
Mr. Astafyev, born in 1924 in the Krasnoyarsk region to parents who died of hunger in the early Soviet years, lived in an orphanage and volunteered to serve on the front in World War II. He lived in Perm and Vologda but returned to Ovsyanka, his ancestral village in Krasnoyarsk, where he built a house, chopped his own wood and not only observed but also lived rural village life.
He returned repeatedly to these themes in his literature.
With the publication in 1959 of the story "The Crossing," Mr. Astafyev became a literary star. "Somewhere Sounds the War," a novel that soon followed, was one of many about the war that was significant to his generation.
"The Damned and the Dead," published in the mid-1970's, was considered the most truthful depiction in Russian literature of World War II and its ruinous effects on Russian villages. In his war novels, Mr. Astafyev questioned decisions made by Stalin and Soviet military leaders.
"Tsar Ryba," one of the few works by Mr. Astafyev translated into English, is an epic, somewhat mythological tale about the threat of ecological catastrophe in Siberia, another favorite theme. "The Sad Detective," published in the 1980's as the Soviet system buckled under Brezhnev's stagnant rule, tells of the miserable life of a detective in a depressed Russian town.
Mr. Astafyev's works were brutally realistic, but critics praised his prose as poetic. He was much honored even in Soviet times, receiving awards like the State Prize of Russia in 1975 for "The Damned and the Dead," but he dared to challenge the Soviet authorities' attacks on Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.
Maybe because he had seen death, he was not afraid, Oleg Tabakov, the actor and director of the Moscow Art Theater, told Russian television last week.
Mr. Astafyev had ugly moments of anti-Semitism, accusing Jews in his writings of corrupting Russian culture. But in recent years he was called the conscience of Russian literature, and Russia's intelligentsia admired his opposition to the Chechen war and his refusal to acknowledge the re-adopted Soviet hymn as Russia's national anthem.
"It was a stupid hymn and a stupid party," he said in an interview.
After Mr. Astafyev's death, some commentators said that Ovsyanka would join Pushkin's home in the Pskov region and Tolstoy's estate as a destination for literary pilgrims. But Krasnoyarsk's regional legislature had turned down a request this summer by Gov. Aleksandr Lebed, the former general, to allocate a special pension of about $117 a month to Mr. Astafyev as a great writer. Communist legislators blocked the measure, but Russian Aluminum, one of the region's industrial giants, said it would pay the pension.
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