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Conclusion The Shukshin Legend Revisited It’s not old age by itself that is worthy of respect, but a life fully lived. If there was one. —Vasilii Shukshin, from a working note VASILII SHUKSHIN’S SUDDEN DEATH in 1974 at age forty-five was followed by an outcry of national grief. His funeral was a huge public event, attracting thousands of mourners. Within a month, some 160,000 letters poured in to television studios, the Committee for Cinematography , the editorial offices of newspapers and journals, and the writer’s apartment.1 The ensuing “Shukshin boom” included memoir literature, nostalgic critical reviews, and tributes by poets like Andrei Voznesenskii, Evgenii Evtushenko, and Vladimir Vysotskii.2 Author and critic Gleb Goryshin quipped that “after the death of the author [. . .] the only people who did not write about Shukshin were those too lazy to write at all.”3 Within two years of the writer’s death, annual “Shukshin readings” were inaugurated in the writer’s home village of Srostki in the Altai region commemorating his July birthdate. Within four years the first museum dedicated to his life and works was opened in the Srostki home Shukshin bought his mother with the royalties from his first novel. It was the first such museum to be erected so soon after the death of a Soviet cultural figure, and it attracts thousands of visitors each year. Partly because of the immense popularity of his final film and partly because that success never led to any openly rebellious posture on Shukshin ’s part, the Soviet government found no reason to temper the meteoric posthumous rise in Shukshin’s fame and stature. On the contrary, there was every incentive to claim the writer for the Soviet literary establishment and to capitalize on his popularity. Mikhail Geller notes the large print runs of posthumous publications of the writer’s works—200,000 copies of a twovolume collection, 300,000 copies of a one-volume anthology, the dedication of two issues of Roman-gazeta (editions of two million each) to his stories, all within a year of the writer’s death—as one sign of “the interest the leaders of Soviet culture had in the work of Vasilii Shukshin.”4 This interest also helps explain why the annual “Shukshin readings” and the opening of the Shukshin museum in Srostki followed so soon after 191 the writer’s death. As John Dunlop argues, “Shukshin was allowed to become a cult figure after his death. This could not have occurred unless this gifted writer, actor and film producer had enjoyed powerful support in the highest ranks of the Party.”5 The idea, perhaps, was to put any controversial aspects of Shukshin’s fiction and film into an acceptable context. Andrei Tarkovsky explains the situation in the following way: “It seems to me that he was somehow feared, that they expected something dangerous or explosive from him. And so when he died, everyone began to thank him for the fact that the explosion never took place.”6 Not only did that explosion never occur, but, in the years following his death, Shukshin was turned into something of a Soviet classic. It was not difficult for the Soviet cultural establishment to appropriate Shukshin’s works, for rarely in his prose do we bump up against what Carl and Ellendea Proffer call the “unmentionable backdrop” of “totalitarian society cut off from the larger world by the Russian Great Wall,” an outcome that makes Shukshin , in their assessment, “one of the best and truest practitioners of Socialist Realism.”7 Although this assertion is overstated—Shukshin’s fiction and films, as we have seen, were clearly not conformist works infused with Party ideology—his art, with few exceptions, did not stray far from what was thematically and stylistically possible at the time. Still, there was an independent and truthful air about Shukshin, detectable in his stories and most apparent in his publicistic writing, which was collected and published posthumously in 1981 and which, according to Igor’ Zotov, “had the sweet aftertaste of opposition.”8 In that volume we find the following passage from an essay Shukshin wrote at the midpoint of his creative career: A sober and reasonable man, of course, always and everywhere ultimately understands his time and knows the truth, and if circumstances are such that it is better for the time being to be silent about it (the truth), then he is silent. An intelligent and talented man will somehow find a...

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