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Chapter Four Unforgettably Strange People The hero. The hero is, in my opinion, the artist himself, his work. —Vasilii Shukshin, “Kommentarii” to “Voprosy samomu sebe” [O]ne finally realizes that [Shukshin] continues to feel part of the mass of the people from whom he came, their ambassador in the city, one of those “oddballs” about whom he always wrote. —Boris Pankin, “Shukshin about Himself: Notes on the Collection Morality Is Truth” FOOLS AND REBELS One feature of Shukshin’s characters that fascinated Soviet audiences was his heroes’ propensity for acting on their impulses. As Geoffrey Hosking notes, “This is the stuff of Shukshin’s human comedy: human feelings thrashing about, spilling out in all sorts of inappropriate, ridiculous and hurtful ways.”1 A few examples from his stories will illustrate. A village grandfather tosses a boot through his son’s television screen because an actor in a TV movie portraying a village carpenter was holding an ax incorrectly (“Critics” [“Kritiki,” 1964]). When a piece of shrapnel begins working its way out of a very tender spot on his derriere after years of lying dormant, an old war veteran is too embarrassed to have the local surgeon—a young woman—operate, so he tries to do the operation himself at home (“Efim P’ianykh’s Operation” [“Operatsiia Efima P’ianykh,” 1966]). A veterinarian is so thrilled over the first successful human heart transplant that he fires two shots from his rifle in the middle of the night, only to be hauled into the police station for disturbing the peace (“Let’s Conquer the Heart!” [“Daesh’ serdtse!” 1968]). A work-brigade foreman gets the sudden urge to demolish an old church and, despite the protestations and pleas of half the village, brings it crashing down (“Tough Guy” [“Krepkii muzhik,” 1970]). A Siberian decides to demonstrate his superiority over a bunch of vacationing city types by unexpectedly throwing himself into the icy autumnal waters of 57 Lake Baikal, only to be rescued by them when his swim trunks become tangled around his feet (“The Strong Get Farther” [“Sil’nye idut dal’she,” 1970]). A man is mistaken by a grocery-store cashier for last night’s drunken troublemaker; when another customer waiting in line adds his own insults, the man is so mortally offended that he runs home to fetch a mallet to kill someone and has to be physically restrained by his wife (“The Insult” [“Obida,” 1971]). A worker takes offense at a faceless bureaucrat and, in the heat of the moment, pours a bottle of ink over the bureaucrat’s new white suit (“Rubles in Words, Kopecks in Figures” [“Nol’-nol’ tselykh,” 1971]). A muzhik who catches his wife fooling around with another man goes after her with an ax, but when he cannot catch her, he chops off two of his own fingers instead (“Fingerless” [“Bespalyi,” 1972]). The list could easily be continued. These protagonists reflect a change in Shukshin’s hero. In the years following the appearance of Country Folk, Shukshin began to develop characters whose personalities and actions were noticeably more eccentric and contradictory. In 1967, this eccentricity and contrariness were explained in a word: chudik (“oddball,” “quirky,” “crank,” “weirdo,” “crackpot,” and “nut” are all possible translations). With the publication of Shukshin’s signature story “Oddball,” a label would attach itself to Shukshin’s protagonist that would outlive both hero and writer alike. Chudik (stressed on the first syllable) is itself an odd word. It has a distinctly whimsical, folksy quality that sets it apart from its literary equivalent , chudak (stressed on the second syllable, “an eccentric”). The authoritative seventeen-volume Academy of Sciences Russian dictionary designates chudik as prostorechie (substandard colloquial), a fact that helps to explain Shukshin’s choice. Chudik carries an informal, affectionate resonance, one that bespeaks the generally positive Russian attitude toward strangeness, be it the inexplicable behavior of holy fools or the antics of the village idiot. In fact, Shukshin’s chudik has something in common with both of these fixtures of the Russian countryside. The word itself shares the same root as chudo (miracle) and the verb chudit’ (to behave eccentrically, oddly; to clown, act the fool; to commit ridiculous, strange deeds).2 Yet it is not so much the holy fool or village idiot but two different figures, the secular chudak and the durak, or “fool,” from Russian folklore, who most closely resemble Shukshin’s “oddball.” In favoring the term chudik over either chudak or durak, however...

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