Seven essays on the best Soviet prose of its day-on Valentin Rasputin, Vasily Shukshin and Fyodor Abramov, and on the moral seriousness that ran through the village prose of the 1970s. Much of the criticism is genuinely good. Felix Kuznetsov could read. He was also, in the same years, First Secretary of the Moscow branch of the Writers' Union of the Russian Federation, one of the most powerful literary-administrative posts in the country. The Union was not a professional association in any Western sense: it controlled who could publish, who received an apartment or a dacha, who was translated and paid, and, through its power to expel, who ceased officially to be a writer at all. Kuznetsov ran its Moscow organisation, and he was very good at it. The year before this appeared, a group of writers including Vasily Aksyonov, Andrei Bitov, Fazil Iskander and Yevgeny Popov assembled an uncensored literary almanac and offered it openly to the authorities. Kuznetsov summoned the younger contributors and supplied the public verdict against them. So this is a book about conscience by a man whose job was to punish it-a professional custodian of literature explaining at length, and often movingly, why literature matters, without letting the word freedom touch the writer. As a document of how the Soviet literary apparatus talked about value, it is hard to better. Translated by Evgeni Filippov from the Russian Horizons of Humaneness. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
