Siberia, Siberia

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.