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The Independent (UK)
28 January 2002
OBITUARY: Viktor Astafyev
BY FELIX CORLEY
IN HIS numerous works of fiction, Viktor Astafyev portrayed, unvarnished, life in rural Russia during the later Soviet period, a life imbued with despair and alcoholism.
After a childhood which saw him experience all the privations possible in the Soviet Union - except imprisonment or execution - Astafyev was one of a generation of young Russians to return in 1945 from life-changing experiences of war to what they hoped would be a better life, only to find the remote countryside little changed.
An authentically peasant writer, who never fitted in amid the Moscow- based literary elite, Astafyev became famous for his stark novels about the Soviet Union's costly victory in the Second World War, in which he questioned decisions taken by Stalin and the military leadership.
It was the publication in 1959 of the story "Pereval" ("The Crossing") that turned Astafyev into a literary star. Gde-to gremit voina ("Somewhere Sounds the War", 1968) was one of many of his war novels that resonated with his generation. Tsar Ryba (The King-Fish, 1972), one of the few works by Astafyev translated into English, is an epic, somewhat mythological tale about the threat of ecological catastrophe in Siberia.
Prokliaty i ubity ("The Damned and the Dead"), published in the mid-1970s and for which Astafyev won the 1975 State Prize, was considered the most truthful literary depiction of the ruinous effects of the war on Russia's villages. The State Prize was the first of what would become many of the Soviet Union's highest literary honours for Astafyev, who also wrote plays and film scripts.
Born in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, Astafyev lost both parents in the 1930s: his father died of hunger and his mother drowned in the Yenisei river. He grew up in an orphanage and, after railway school in Novosibirsk, volunteered for the front in the Second World War. It was not until he was 27 that his first works were published in his local paper in the Urals and he was eventually admitted to the Soviet Writers' Union in 1958.
By the end of the 1970s Astafyev had become a leading figure in the more nationalist "village writing" school, incorporating a covert, more political agenda, pointing out the virtues of Russian rural life untouched by Communist dictates. He even dared to challenge the Soviet authorities' attacks on his fellow novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Pechalnyi detektiv ("The Sad Detective", 1986), published just as the Soviet system buckled under the after-effects of Leonid Brezhnev's stagnant rule, tells of the miserable life of a detective in a depressed provincial town. By the glasnost era of the late 1980s, Astafyev had turned to politics. With other board members of the conservative journal Nash Sovremennik ("Our Contemporary") he founded the Fellowship of Russian Artists, which opposed the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of Russia itself.
In the semi-free elections to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989, he became a deputy as a Writers' Union nominee. He contributed to debates, once arguing publicly with Mikhail Gorbachev about the extent to which the state should have the power to crack down on public protests (Astafyev rejected any state powers to stifle peaceful protests).
Like many writers in his circle, he was not free of anti-Semitism, accusing Jews in his writings of corrupting Russian culture. Some admired his opposition to the Chechen war and his refusal to acknowledge the readopted Soviet hymn as Russia's national anthem. "It was a stupid hymn and a stupid party," he declared.
Astafyev always disliked cities. For short periods after the war he lived in Perm and Vologda but returned to Ovsyanka, his ancestral village in Krasnoyarsk region, where he built a house, chopped his own wood and not only observed, but also lived, village life.
Krasnoyarsk's regional legislature - led by Communist deputies - turned down a request this summer by the Governor of Krasnoyarsk, Aleksandr Lebed, the former general, to grant Astafyev a special pension as a great writer. Russian Aluminium, one of the region's industrial giants, said it would pay the pension.
Despite a stroke last spring, Astafyev continued up to his death to work on the latest book in a trilogy entitled Tak khochetsia zhit ("I Want to Survive").
Viktor Petrovich Astafyev, writer: born Ovsyanka, Soviet Union 1 May 1924; married 1945 Mariya Koryakina (two daughters); died Krasnoyarsk, Russia 29 November 2001.
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