The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by any intellectual activity, nor even by a combination of the two, as historians have supposed, but by the activity of all the people participating in the event, who always combine in such a way that those who take the largest direct share in the event take the least responsibility, and vice versa.

Lev Tolstoi, War and Peace^[1]

The ability to see time, to read time, in the spatial whole of the world and, on the other hand, to perceive the filling of space not as an immobile background, a given that is completed once and for all, but as an emerging whole, an event – this is the ability to read in everything signs that show time in its course, beginning with nature and ending with human customs and ideas (all the way to abstract concepts).

Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism”^[2]

Time, moving in one mighty, general current, is subdivided for each of us and takes the form of our homeland.

Valentin Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia^[3]

In literary portrayals spanning four decades, Valentin Rasputin has elaborated an alternative narrative of Russian history in which Siberia represents everything that Moscow, modernity, and centralized authority do not. Rasputin’s nonfiction writing of the Gorbachev period turned especially persistently to historiographical issues, explicitly engaging with the works of previous Siberian regionalist historians and questioning how, why, and for whom histories are written. His book Sibir’, Sibir’…(Siberia, Siberia, 1991) attempts to establish the regional identity and characteristics of Siberia, selecting particular historical moments and particular chroniclers of those moments to convey a sense of the defining elements of Siberia’s past. Through the eyes of Rasputin and the words of the sources from which he quotes, readers are offered a particular version or interpretation of history, one that is shaped in conscious opposition to centralized imperial or Soviet power and instead relies on an anti-intellectual pioneer mentality and a communal identity rooted in legend and in the specificity of place. For Rasputin, history writing is never an end in itself. It is bound up with concerns about memory, community, and tradition. What he agitates for is not simply a usable past for a country unsure of its national narrative; it is an embodied past, strongly felt by its bearers as something experienced in their way of life and incarnate in their very being.
Rasputin built a reputation in the 1960s and 1970s as a fiction writer and one of the foremost representatives of Village Prose, sharing with other Village Prose writers of the 1950s-1970s themes of “a return to childhood and the past, poignant observation of the changing environment, lyrical appreciation of the beauty of nature, and a questioning of the values of the modern world.”^[4] Siberia, Siberia marked something of a departure for him; while he had written regular journalistic pieces since the 1970s and in 1987 had published a collection of sketches, interviews, and reviews, Siberia, Siberia was and remains by far his most ambitious nonfiction project. In making this shift, Rasputin followed a time-honored compulsion of Russian novelists. “Indeed,” states Andrew Wachtel, “it turns out that at some point in their careers practically all of Russia’s most famous writers took it upon themselves to write the nation’s history,” returning to topics already treated in their fiction.^[5]
Many of Rasputin’s concerns have been notably consistent from the post-Stalin 1960s to the post-Soviet 1990s and beyond, but the model of Russian identity that his works develop suddenly took on particular topicality in the waning years of the Soviet Union, the years in which he was working on Siberia, Siberia (a time in which the turn toward writing history and publitsistika was heightened in a climate of pressing public debate on fundamental national issues). The country’s startling metamorphosis into something quite unexpected led to an existential as well as a very practical crisis that transformed daily life and made fundamental school subjects (history, politics, even literature) difficult to teach until basic questions about the nation’s past, present, and future could be answered. As one Russian observer wrote later in the 1990s, “the state is undergoing a very complicated, systemic crisis... But the deepest crisis we are enduring is a crisis of ideas. Until we restore our identity, until we figure out our own value system, until we find our own idea, we will not really be able to solve a single other problem.”^[6] Rasputin’s trenchant regionalism offered answers to such issues and therefore has resonated with readers both within Russia and outside it.^[7] For a Russian audience, a strong regional identity offers an alternative to a schematic and problematic state-based national identity. Today discussions of center and periphery in Russian culture often take place on two levels simultaneously: if Russia’s regions can evolve and prosper without excessive exploitation by centralized authority, the resulting development can in turn ensure that Russia’s place in the world is a central rather than a peripheral one.^[8]
Seen from a Western perspective, Rasputin offers both a deeply conservative narrative – at times a chauvinistic one – and yet one in tune with progressive tendencies in environmentalism and local grass-roots activism. Some of his nationalist statements in the Gorbachev period, and his anti-Semitism in particular, are especially troubling.^[9] Yet he is not a representative of the tendency characterized (at roughly the same historical moment) by Francis Fukuyama – himself known for an attempt to fill the interpretive void resulting from Gorbachev’s reforms and Russia’s transformation – as “the fascist alternative,” made up of “a very strong current of great Russian chauvinism” on the part of “ultra-nationalists.”^[10] While certainly an ultra-nationalist, Rasputin does not advocate a fascist state or other authoritarian system. He advocates the opposite: close-knit communities that are rooted in strong families and are unhindered by the demands of a rapacious state. Rasputin’s ideal for Russia does not represent either path of the “fork in the road” that Fukuyama saw in Russia’s future, one branching off to Fascism, the other to Western liberal democracy (and therefore to a post-historical time).^[11] Rather, in Siberia, Siberia he seems to promote a historically grounded and consciously non-Western form of responsible libertarianism (even as, while writing the work, he paradoxically adopted a direct role in government as a delegate in the Soviet parliament and a member of Gorbachev’s Presidential Council).

The Uses of the Past

Siberia, Siberia consists of six essays focused on various regions of Siberia framed by two more general articles: “Siberia without the Romance” and “Your Siberia and Mine.” The chapters first appeared separately in various periodicals in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but Rasputin wrote them with the overall project in mind from the start, identifying them as “chapters from the book Siberia, Siberia.”^[12] Since the book’s publication he has continued to add additional material, working toward a second volume.^[13] The genre of the volume that has appeared thus far fits best under the heading of publitsistika, and thus allows Rasputin a flexible vehicle to confront a range of topics. The tripartite subject description that the U.S. Library of Congress gives the book – under the headings “History,” “Ethnopsychology,” and “Environmental conditions” – gives a sense of Rasputin’s wide-ranging discussion, but such a listing ignores the personal and idiosyncratic elements of the book, which at times is closer to memoir, at others to travel narrative, and elsewhere returns to reflections on architecture, one of Rasputin’s recurring themes. The lush, full-color photography of Boris Dmitriev, found throughout the original edition, also gives the book the appeal of an extended ethnographic, natural-historical, and architectural photo essay.
Nevertheless, in spite of this heterogeneity, history is central to Siberia, Siberia. Like any historical account (or any other narrative), the book emphasizes certain events and ascribes meaning to them in particular ways. As Hayden White discusses in Metahistory, an historian examining the past immediately makes a conscious or unconscious choice about what in it has importance, about what counts as an historical “event,” and about which moments, events, people, and periods are particularly significant.^[14] Even a simple chronological listing of events in a chronicle presents a selection; when that chronicle is further organized into a narrative historical account, motivation and plot are added – characterizing and shaping events as part of a beginning, middle, and end of a story.
Rasputin would doubtless have little use for White’s ideas on narrative or his Formalist typologies; he makes clear in Siberia, Siberia that he views historiography and most scholarly history-writing with suspicion and frustration. But Siberia, Siberia exemplifies precisely the process of selection that White describes: Rasputin’s choice of significant features decidedly favors particular periods and particular kinds of historical actors. Rasputin singles out moments, people – and also particular places – that have remained (or should remain, in his opinion) in popular memory as the common history of the entire community.
Rasputin divides his attention very unevenly over the past four centuries. The narrative focus of his historical accounts is consistently on origins and beginnings – the earliest period of Russian settlement, Tobol’sk as first in everything, and other emphases on births, openings, and discoveries. Fittingly, then, he gives special attention to the first century of Russian conquest of Siberia and the incredible speed with which Russians spread across the continent in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Particularly significant for him are the expeditions and voyages of discovery; the first construction of forts, churches, and homes; and the written documents left behind (many of which are illustrated in the book). Rasputin returns repeatedly to the early Russian (and mostly Cossack) explorers, discoverers, and adventurers in Siberia. These figures are described as larger-than-life, bogatyr’-type epic heroes. Rasputin writes,

“The Cossacks played an exceptional, almost supernatural role in conquering and opening up Siberia. Only a special class of people – daring, desperate, and not crushed by the ponderous Russian state – could do what they, by some miracle, managed to do.”^[15]

Central among these figures is Yermak, original conqueror of Siberia, who crossed the Urals in the early 1580s. Rasputin sees Yermak as unfairly forgotten in the typical overviews of Russian history: his accomplishment compares to that of Columbus, yet even his real name and ancestry are unknown.^[16] Rasputin uses his discussion of Yermak to address historiographical questions explicitly:

“No other historical figure seems to have left as many unanswered questions as Yermak. He turned out to be a true Cossack in this regard, too, having covered his tracks well. The debate over his name, his motives, and the details of his campaign began in the eighteenth century, continued in the nineteenth, and hasn’t ended even now. And the harder historians try to arrive at the truth, the more they confuse things.^[17]
Rasputin seems sure that historical truth does exist somewhere independently from historians’ misguided attempts to arrive at it. But amidst all the unsubstantiated revisionist versions of Yermak’s story, Rasputin sighs in despair, saying “…conjecture won’t make things any more confused than they already are, and if truth sighs one more time in disappointment, we won’t be able to hear it anyway” – although he adds that he has “no intention of getting into an argument with the historians.”^[18]
Instead of conjecture and debate, the folkloric features of Yermak’s conquest predominate in Rasputin’s retelling:

“Regarding Siberia’s first hero and his feat, we are obviously on safest ground when following the well-known trails blazed by history. The revised versions proposed by present-day scholars are not convincing enough to accept without reservations… Isn’t it safer in this instance to rely on folk memory and folk intuition, which rarely erred in assigning… heroic traits…?”^[19]
By contrast, certain major events and figures of the twentieth century are dealt with only obliquely. Stalin’s terror and its immense impact on Siberia are passed over in near-total silence, even though Rasputin discusses events from the 1950s on in some detail, especially in his treatment of environmental concerns. The Gulag system receives only glancing mentions, and the results of collectivization are seen only in the far-northern settlement of Russkoe Ust’e. Indeed, no Soviet leader, from Lenin to Gorbachev, is mentioned explicitly – even Stalin does not appear. There seem to be two separate explanations for this; first, Rasputin avoids explicit political discussion or criticism of the Soviet system, with the notable exception of his support of environmental causes and attacks on damaging industries and bureaucratic incompetence. Second, though, Rasputin shows consistent suspicion of central authority, whether Tsarist or Soviet. In several passages, he even implies that the Tsarist government under Ivan the Terrible’s successors, under Peter, and under Catherine the Great tended to side with the native peoples over the Russian explorers and settlers – and thus Rasputin casts the Russian Siberians as caught in the middle between hostile authorities and aboriginals.^[20]
In fact, the native peoples of Siberia are dealt with only in passing in the book, and Rasputin does not even bother to comment on a passage he quotes from another source in which the native peoples are likened to locusts:

“Yermak’s feat, the conquest of an entire realm with a handful of Cossacks, was, of course, astonishing. No matter how superior to a bow and arrow a rifle might be, we still must not forget that locusts can extinguish whole bonfires that block their path, even though the multitudes of them perish.”^[21]

In one passage dealing with mixed marriages between natives and Russians, Rasputin shows a brief, stereotyping Western interest in the exciting, exotic female beauty of Eastern Siberian women, whose “broad cheekbones and slanting eyes … give female beauty new contours and an expressive freshness that sets it apart from the tired, washed-out look of European beauty.”^[22] More often, though, he discusses mixed marriage negatively in terms of impurity and dilution.
Rasputin’s primary focus is on the specifically Russian presence in Siberia, so he deals mainly with the past 420 or so years, with mention of earlier Russian contacts with Siberia. His real heroes are common farmers and settlers, who are glorified in the book even more than the early explorers. Moreover, the early Cossack adventurers are significant precisely because they are the best manifestations of the narod. Rasputin explains:

“Yermak, a man of the common people, was extremely well suited [to take Kuchum], as if the people themselves had sent him to Siberia and then rewarded him with fame. He, along with Stepan Razin, became permanent favorites of the Russian people, the embodiment of their ancient, freedom-loving aspirations.”^[23]
For the history that interests Rasputin is written by and for the narod. History is not a logical narrative or scientific process. It is, rather, consciously anti-intellectual and anti-scientific; in his own history writing Rasputin therefore privileges tradition, myth, and popular legend. He finds legends to be the real bearers of historical truth: why, he asks, “are we so suspicious of legends. Don’t they, in the majority of cases, bring us true events from the most ancient epochs…?”^[24] Legends are shared by a community, preserved in the collective memory and spread in oral form.
Legends are also most often grounded in specific locations.^[25] For a book presented in part as a history, Siberia, Siberia is perhaps unusual in that the basic organizing principle behind it is based on place, not chronology. Between his two framing chapters, Rasputin presents chapters on Tobol’sk, Baikal, Irkutsk, Gornyi Altai, Kiakhta, and Russkoe Ust’e. The geographical process of selection stands out as much as does Rasputin’s selectivity in choosing historical events and figures: major cities and regions are left out, including Novosibirsk and all of the Far East. Rasputin focuses rather on those places that are especially steeped in the periods he chooses to emphasize and that will best convey his sense of the particular kind of historical wealth that Siberia has to offer. This living, place-grounded history has power both to conserve and to effect change; it is thus a usable history.^[26] In the course of Siberia, Siberia history itself becomes not so much an exploration of the past, but a sentient force, a Russian manifest destiny: Rasputin thus sees the reason for Russian expansion eastward as “the will of history.”^[27]

HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL STORYLINES

Numerous studies of the fiction by Rasputin and other Village Prose writers have dealt with the importance of the past to the writers of this movement.^[28] Whether the particular temporal orientation of Village Prose is seen as a continuation of Socialist Realist attitudes toward time or as a reversal of those attitudes, readers agree that the past of much Village Prose writing is an idyllic one, an idealized and mostly unchanging state of grace from which the modern world has fallen.^[29] There is, then, an inherent tension in Rasputin’s turn to history in his later Siberia, Siberia. To address history head-on, as he does in Siberia, Siberia, Rasputin has to deal with the historical process – the dynamism of change rather than the cyclical, endless repetitions and unchanging essence of an idyllic lost world like Oblomovka or, closer to home, his own Matyora. While many of his subjects, themes, and ideas remain constant, Rasputin must now treat them in a somewhat different way.
In searching for a more practical engagement with history as process, Rasputin asserts an affinity with his nineteenth-century intellectual forebears, the Siberian oblastniki (regionalists), to whom he constantly alludes in Siberia, Siberia. As Steven G. Marks points out, the parallel is somewhat forced, since, unlike the regionalists’ “positive, realistic program for gradual change,” many of Rasputin’s ideas “are unworkable if not counterproductive.”^[30] But when compared to his treatment of the past and its implications for the present in his fiction – his apocalyptic conclusion to Farewell to Matyora, for example – Siberia, Siberia in fact represents something of a concession to practical contemporary issues. Rasputin shares with the oblastniki a belief that exploration of the region’s past is crucial for the construction of its future. Like them, he believes that such an exploration has to be a literary endeavor in the broad sense of the term. He would likely agree with oblastnik Nikolai Mikhailovich Iadrintsev – whom he cites in Siberia, Siberia – in Iadrintsev’s query near the end of his article “Sibir’ pered sudom russkoi literatury” (“Siberia Before the Court of Russian Literature,” 1866), “To whom must belong the role of showing Siberia her future and leading her people out on the path of civilization and historical progress?” Iadrintsev’s answer: “That role must belong to regional literature… Regional journalism will investigate our land, work out her issues, and demonstrate her interest; it will show her a future that will consist not of conquests, as the panegyrists assert, but in the creation of a civilization for her people, which together with trade will have an influence on all of the East and on Asia.”^[31]
Since Siberia, Siberia is a self-consciously literary history meant for a popular audience – not an objective account by a professional historian – the “storylines” it creates to give meaning and significance to time and space are particularly well-developed, if at times idiosyncratic.^[32] As seen above, Rasputin weaves the stories, histories, legends, and anecdotes that make up Siberia, Siberia into a larger narrative about the significance of Siberian history. Such story-telling, notes Hayden White, has teleological and moral dimensions: “[t]he way one approaches the past, the posture one assumes before the data of history, the voice with which one reports one’s findings about the past, the ratio between one’s capacities for tolerance and one’s interest in interpreting and criticizing – all these are functions of a metahistoriographical, and specifically ethical, decision regarding the uses to which one’s knowledge ought to be put.”^[33] With Siberia, Siberia, Rasputin seeks to demonstrate the power derived from an awareness of the past and the real and immediate effect that power can have on the present and future: he shows that without memory, we lose the greatest riches of the past, not even realizing we once possessed them.^[34]
The significance Rasputin gives to geographical storylines in Siberia, Siberia is as great as that he ascribes to historical narratives. Just as Village Prose had reversed the country/city dynamic of much previous Soviet literature, returning to nineteenth-century models,^[35] the Siberian regions presented in Siberia, Siberia provide an alternative geographic narrative to the standard one found in school textbooks, politics, and national discourse in the 1980s, in which the centralized and imperial narrative centered on the development from Kievan Russia through Moscow and St. Petersburg predominated. Rasputin further shares with the nineteenth-century oblastniki a perspective on Russian history very much focused on the relationship between the center and periphery of the culture (or between the “metropolis” and the “colony,” in nineteenth-century terms), one that consistently sees the margins – exploited Siberia – as more significant and worthy of study than the imperialist center, and as in fact preserving core beliefs and ways of life that had been wiped out in less remote places by meddling from Moscow.^[36] Rasputin puts a positive spin on Siberia’s vastness and remoteness, and he focuses on it almost to the exclusion of Moscow, offering an antipode to discredited models of central authority and national development. In a reversal of expected valuations, even “the outer limit of survival and sorrow… become[s] the Promised Land.”^[37]
Just as the move to address the historical process in Siberia, Siberia had necessitated an approach different from that found in Village Prose, so, too, the need to encompass a territory much vaster than the intimate malaia rodina (the “little homeland” of one’s native region) of Village Prose led Rasputin to reconsider the meaning of that term. Queried in an interview about the purpose of his book, Rasputin responded:

“The purpose is to bow down before this powerful land, my “malaia” rodina of ten million and more square kilometers, to speak a good word of its gatherers, builders, and guardians, and to summon my compatriots to rise up to defend Siberia from plunderers, both domestic and hard-currency. Perhaps it’s still hard to see, but in the future, I think, the center of Russia, and not only the material center, will move to Siberia.”^[38]
That Rasputin’s vision of Siberia is anchored particularly firmly in both time and space can be seen in a listing of some of the recurring issues in Siberia, Siberia: environmental and landscape history; architectural history; narratives of conquest and the theories of geographical space that they imply; and the interconnection of personal history, one’s malaia rodina, and the country’s past as a whole. All of these categories – meant to evoke the richness of Siberia and the power of its legends – combine temporal and spatial dimensions. Out of them Rasputin forges his own version of a usable past and a distinctive Siberian chronotope.^[39]

SIBERIA AS CHRONOTOPE

In a 1966 short story entitled “Globus,” Rasputin unites time and place in the image of a globe that falls and smashes: “’The past, flowing downwards, had formed the basis of the globe’s stability, and the future froze within it, like an undiscovered, mysterious substance.”^[40] As David C. Gillespie notes in quoting this passage, “the world, in Rasputin’s fiction, thus hangs in the balance, caught between stability and catastrophe.”^[41] This fragile, intimate, and necessary balance between one’s world (Homeland, malaia rodina, home, etc.) and one’s temporal location between a past that gives stability and an often apocalyptic future is a defining feature of Village Prose. Several scholars, in noting the unique temporal and spatial orientations of Village Prose, have found in it various chronotopes – using Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships.”^[42] Thus, Katerina Clark discusses Socialist Realist and Stalinist chronotopes and their revisions in the “youth novel,” Village Prose, and the works of Solzhenitsyn and Aitmatov, while Kathleen Parthй singles out the “chronotope of Childhood” and “the forgotten chronotope of the traditional village.”^[43] In Siberia, Siberia Rasputin perpetuates this tendency, as Siberia itself becomes a chronotope.
In defining his idea of the chronotope Bakhtin writes that, when expressed in literature, “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”^[44] While concentrating on “the literary artistic chronotope,” Bakhtin also discusses a number of chronotopes that figure both in literature and in life.^[45] A particular chronotope entails particular identities and roles for those characters involved in it and a specific relationship to time (how, for example, “the past,” natural and mythological cycles, or “adventure time” are experienced in – or set apart from – daily life). It can also privilege particular sizes (big, small, etc.), dimensions and directions (e.g. verticality, up or down), actors (adventurers, servants, the “man of the people”), and possible connections between characters and objects within a matrix (including hierarchical or egalitarian, generational, etc.). As Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson note, a chronotope shapes the “image of a person” and the “field of possibilities” that are possible within a given genre (and, by implication, within a particular chronotopic apprehension of the world).^[46] Siberia as presented in Siberia, Siberia offers a chronotope with specific implications for a sense of self and place, a relationship to the past, and a privileging of particular historical and public figures – features already seen in Rasputin’s stance toward the past, Yermak as folk hero, and Rasputin’s enormous “malaia” rodina, to name only a few examples.
Rasputin’s Siberia chronotope is not primarily logical in its orientation and organization but instead depends on an emotional sense of connection to time and place. Siberia, Siberia conveys this sense through its own impressionistic organization, which is not linear along either temporal or spatial axes: from chapter to chapter geographical location zigzags across the map, and within each chapter Rasputin moves unpredictably from current impressions to ancient history and back again. A reader comes away with a strong impression of Siberia’s richness and diversity rather than with an ordered sequence of events or places.
The legends Rasputin so prizes offer one crucial inroad into the essence of his Siberia chronotope. Legends, after all, connect a people equally to a place and to memories of its past, which, Rasputin argues, is the true importance of history. Through memory, he seeks to “arouse the sensitive currents between past and present, between people and history.”^[47] History as we see it in Siberia, Siberia is an insistently embodied essence – hence the exception the Rasputin makes for the oblastniki in his general scorn for historians, since as Siberians themselves, these historians bridge an important gap between academic writing and the living, local traditions of the people of Siberia.^[48] Rasputin vividly demonstrates this living, embodied history in passages such as the following:

“We Russians automatically carry within ourselves the antiquity of Kiev, the greatness of Novgorod, the pain of Ryazan, the sanctity of Optina Monastery, and the immortality of Yasnaya Polyana and Staraya Russa. The dates of our country’s victories and losses flicker in us like the burning bush.”^[49]

Or, similarly:

“Tobolsk lives within each Siberian, whether he’s ever been there or not, the way Moscow lives in every Russian and Kiev in every Slav.”^[50]
In these statements temporal and spatial connections are combined: people are rooted to their history because they are rooted to their native land, and vice versa. History has to be innate; it cannot be introduced artificially, and “Using the past in the name of inculcation or even comparison is usually a useless and senseless pursuit.”^[51]
Thus for Rasputin a strong sense of homeland allows a person “to descend into the most distant hidden recesses, into the remote depths of the history of his native land.”^[52] He continues:

“People cannot stand firmly or live confidently without this feeling, without a sense of closeness to the acts and destinies of their ancestors, without an inner comprehension of their responsibility for the place granted them in the vast, general continuum that allows them to be what they are.”^[53]

With that feeling and that awareness of connection, people preserve the ability to stand firm in the face of other narratives and chronotopes, including the dominant assumptions of modern society. As Bakhtin notes, relations between various chronotopes (in art, life, and between art and life) are dialogical in their clashes and other interactions.^[54] In defining the chronotope of Siberia, Rasputin is offering his compatriots a grounding in a specifically Siberian sense of time and space which can allow them to stand up to the competing senses presented in political discourse from the center, alienating or homogenizing modern life, or radio and television programming. History, then, becomes not so much a subject for individuals to study, but rather a tradition for a particular community to “live and remember,” as Rasputin titled one of his more famous works. Siberia, in one of the recurring images of Siberia, Siberia, is “a fortress… a storehouse… a force… [and] a bastion,”^[55] where that memory – albeit selectively – is preserved.