Vasily Shukshin
Stories from a Siberian Village
Trans. Laura Michael and John Givens. Foreword by Kathleen Parthé
DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. Pp. 256. $35.00 $16.00
Reviewed by Laura Beraha

This, the fifth collection of Shukshin’s works to appear in English, comes a quarter-century after the death of its author, over a decade since the dismantling of the ideological system that shaped his art of resistance, and some two hundred years into the tradition of Russian rural romanticism. Stories from a Siberian Village traces through a balanced selection of twenty-five tales the writer’s lifelong quest for identity. Through a dynamic conception of place, both as point of de­parture and source of inspiration, Shukshin the rugged nonconformist can be seen to achieve reconciliation with his roots. In an informative introduction, translator and Shukshin scholar John Givens invites the English-language reader to view the writer’s work as a single if variegated whole. The dynamic principles Givens discovers include the negotiation of distances “geographical, cultural and political” between Muscovite center and Siberian periphery, reaching out for an active response, and a return to immediacy in the craft of the “folk storyteller.”

A unity of approach represents the collection’s outstanding achievement. A preface by Kathleen Parthé, author of the definitive study Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (1992), portrays Shukshin as odd man out in this key movement during its heyday in the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s. Even then, Shuk­shin looked not back, but down, through a darker nostalgia, to the tensions of villagers divided not so much between themselves and their big-city cousins, as in their very souls. Givens and co-translator Laura Michael recapture the clash of urban and rural idioms in a credible, colloquial English, accurately following the author’s lead where dialect, folk songs, laments, proverbs, and anecdotes sharpen the contrasts. Their character dialogue is taut and convincing, their han­dling of invective at times much raunchier than the publishing norms of Shuk­shin’s own day; while a different, lower threshold of tolerance for sentimentality in North American parlance gives an unavoidably mawkish tinge to the author’s occasional bittersweet moment. Phonetic devices-“hafta” (have to), “outta” (out of), a more or less consistent reliance on the apostrophe for “-ing” (makin’, any­thin’) and the like-supply a generic, colloquial base. For the most part only older characters resort, where appropriate, to a more marked yokel diction as in “Them were different times” or “set [sit] a spell.” This generalized North Ameri­can register (“Howdy, folks!”) is stable, though “bro” as a slangy variant on “brother” or “all right, already!” might strike some readers as too specifically New York in inspiration. It serves particularly well as a foil for the characters’ occasional foray into city style (“Ph.Dame” and “an-nul-ify a telegram” to mark their envious awe of an educated Muscovite woman or deference to officialese).

The deliberately thin line between Shukshin’s narrator and character dis­course is handled well; seldom does the translation stray into overly bookish diction. Where Shukshin’s terse ellipses must inevitably, if regrettably, fall prey to the demands of English syntax, the translation usually rises to a smooth and faithful filling in of the context implied. What it sacrifices in roughness of rhythm, it makes up for with dexterity, particularly in the variety of terms for abuse-verbal, as mentioned above, and physical, in an impressive onslaught of clobbering, smacking, popping “across the face,” giving “upside the head,” and so on. In short, where previous translations have striven to convey the meta­physical, ontological, and spiritual wounds of the “skandal,” the “archetypal Shukshin situation” (Geoffrey Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism, 1980), Michael and Givens have returned to it its raw, brute force.

As for the quintessential Russianness that Shukshin embodies for so many of his contemporaries and compatriots, here too the effort has been both consistent and well-considered. Shukshin’s own indulgence in exotic, ethnographic, or re­gional detail and terminology pales beside that of other associates of Rural Prose; their incidence rises in the autobiographical pieces that make such a welcome addition to, and point of comparison in, the present volume. The author’s tactic is to supply unobtrusive in-text glosses; his translators follow suit here, and elsewhere, for more general Russian background material unfamiliar to the Eng­lish reader. Thus, a collective farm chairman is reassured, in a smoothly inte­grated expansion, that his farm’s haying fields will not be trampled down by a berry-picking expedition planned by his wife (five words in the original, eight­een in translation). Historical and sociological references are elucidated in foot­notes and in a glossary that does a particularly good job of explaining the ar­rangement of the peasant homestead and bathhouse, so that their Russian terms-izba and banya-can be used throughout the text to maintain its Russian flavor. Literary allusions are limited to the printed word (Esenin, Gogol and Sholokhov), while the snatches of folk songs that inspire Shukshin’s characters and so much of his imagery are not expanded upon, no doubt in view of the paucity of available English translations.

Stories from a Siberian Village is down-to-earth in detail, style, and theme-a fitting tribute to the punchy performance art of writer, actor, and internationally renowned film director Vasily Shukshin.