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Chapter Eight Telling His Own Story Every real writer, of course, is a psychologist, but he himself is the patient. —Vasilii Shukshin, from a working note EGOR PROKUDIN from Kalina krasnaia and Vasilii Kniazev from “Oddball”—to choose two characters who could not be more different from each other—are alike in two important ways. Like their creator , they both navigate in various ways and with different consequences the hazardous distance between the village and the city. In addition, they share episodes from Shukshin’s life and aspects of his personality. Yet, strictly speaking, these characters cannot be considered autobiographical, for in both instances Shukshin seems to have attributed to them events that happened in his own life simply for the convenience of plot, and perhaps out of a sense of affinity with them. Still, there is a fine line between “the autobiography invaded by fiction” and “fiction involving the autobiography of the author,”1 and in a number of other works—most important, his Liubavin Family novels—a submerged autobiographical discourse emerges that is as distinct as it is important for understanding Shukshin. The distance between Shukshin’s home village and Moscow, and the disparity between his private history and his public biography, created a painful duality in the artist. Like many of his characters, Shukshin was stuck, spiritually and psychologically, between two realms: the rural landscape of his childhood, innocent but unattainable, and the city of his adult years, where he achieved success but felt he had compromised his identity. This duality is reflected in stories that span Shukshin’s career. The successful urban hero of Shukshin’s story “Two Letters” (“Dva pis’ma,” 1967) calls the sudden, intense longing to revisit his home village—a yearning tinged by feelings that he had betrayed his childhood dreams—the onset of “a mild schizophrenia” (1:331). In so doing, he gives a name to the artist’s own malady. Initially, the artist treated his “split personality” in third-person narratives whose plots are only indirectly autobiographical. In stories such as “Ignakha’s Come Home,” “O See the Horses Gallop in the Fields,” “Two Letters,” “How the Bunny Went for a Balloon Ride,” and the screenplay My Brother, Shukshin invests the different sides of his conflicted identity in 153 separate characters—typically older and younger brothers, former village classmates, or fathers and sons—who confront each other and themselves over the choices they have made either to leave or remain in the village. Later, in the cycle “From the Childhood Years of Ivan Popov,” Shukshin resorts to a more openly autobiographical first-person narrative in order to address these issues. His most important autobiographical treatment, however , emerges in Book Two of The Liubavin Family, which represents a combination of both approaches. SHUKSHIN AND THE BROTHER COMPLEX Diane Nemec Ignashev was the first critic to identify the importance of “the schizophrenic/brother complex” in Shukshin’s fiction.2 One brother has left the village, usually for a successful but somehow compromised life in the city; the other has stayed home in the village and leads a quieter, less conspicuous life. In playing these two characters off each other, Shukshin is also examining two sides of his own personality. While this does not strictly constitute autobiography, Shukshin had a decidedly personal stake in the outcome of this kind of artistic investigation. In “Ignakha’s Come Home,” the first of his stories about brothers, Shukshin’s wrestling with the problem of a split identity is glimpsed in the wrestling match that never takes place between the Baikalov brothers, Ignakha , visiting from the city, and Vasia, who has remained in the village. As we have seen earlier, their father disapproves of Ignakha’s life and is especially dismissive of Ignakha’s job as a circus wrestler. We learn in the film version of the story in Your Son and Brother that he considers Ignakha’s circus work a waste of the strength given him by his Siberian homeland, strength that should be given back through honest labor. He is confident that Vasia’s brawn will triumph over his older brother’s circus training. Vasia refuses to wrestle, however, and the story ends with this central conflict unresolved. Shukshin’s own quandary is easy to discern here. Shukshin “wasted” his strength not in the circus but in another urban form of diversionary entertainment —the cinema. In “O See the Horses Gallop in the Fields,” written shortly after “Ignakha’s Come...

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