Farewell to Matyora

A fine example of Village Prose from the post-Stalin era, Farewell to Matyora decries the loss of the Russian peasant culture to the impersonal, soulless march of progress.

It is th efinal summer of the peasant village of Matyora. A dam will be completed in the fall, destroying the village. Although their departure is inevitable, the characters over when, and even whether, they should leave. A haunting story with a heartfelt theme, Farewell to Matyora is a passionate plea for humanity and an eloquent cry for a return to an organic life.

"Remarkable. . . . Rasputin is the kind of writer of whom Chekhov, that most sensible of all Russian writers, would have approved--a man linked to the soil through its people, apolitical without being nihilistic, profoundly humane." --Christian Science Monitor

"Farewell to Matyora is, next to Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and 'Matryona's Home,' the most important work of literature written and published in the Soviet Union between Stalin's death in 1953 and the beginning of glasnost in 1985." --Kathleen ParthÉ