Antisemitism and the Decline of Russian Village Prose
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This volume offers a detailed analysis of the literary careers of the three leading representatives of Russian village prose, Viktor Astafiev, Vasily Belov, and Valentin Rasputin. It demonstrates how the “village” writers actively disseminated both the popular and the state-sponsored forms of Soviet antisemitism. Shrayer argues that the leading “village” writers caused the decline of Russian village prose by having inscribed the anti-Semitic narrative into their literary works and public discursive statements.
Maxim D. Shrayer, a bilingual author, scholar and translator, is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College and Director of the Project on Russian & Eurasian Jewry at Harvard’s Davis Center. He has authored and edited fifteen books in English and Russian, among them the internationally acclaimed memoirs Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story and Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, the story and novella collections Yom Kippur in Amsterdam and A Russian Immigrant, and the Holocaust study I Saw It, and the travelogue With or Without You. Shrayer is the recipient of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.