Peasant utopias of the Altai territory in Russian prose of 1960s-1980s

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the CPSU and the Soviet government, implementing a program of building communism in a short time, launched the process of industrialization of agriculture and proletarization of the peasantry. Writers of rural themes perceived this movement as a threat to the national identity of the Russian people and tried to contrast the state projects with the historical experience of the grassroots peasant initiative in creating rural communities of high productive labor, class equality, abundance, and original culture. The article considers two types of artistic models of the peasant world order: “closed”, focused on the centuries-old traditions of the Russian peasant community (V. Lichutin, V. Rasputin), and “open”, characteristic of the utopias of the Altai chronotope, focused on the post-revolutionary new peasantry order (S. Zalygin, V. Shukshin). The problem is in the degree of the utopian and the real in models of both types and their relevance in the modern search for the Russian way of revival and development of the peasant world. The scientific basis of this work is the research of the history and theory of the utopia genre and its modifications in Russian prose of the second half of the twentieth century: K. Chistov, Ya. Lurie, V. Shestakov, E. Shatsky, V. Grikhin, V. Chalikova, K. Parte, A. Gulygi, N. Tsvetnoy, N. Kovtun, A. Razuvalova, etc. We used sociological, comparative-historical, comparative-typological, and motivic methods.