Kizhi island and “rural” writers: a history of failed relationships

The article continues and develops the study of the image of Kizhi Island in the Soviet literature of the 1960s and 1970s, in this particular case, regarding its representation by various literary groups and movements. For the first time, the attitude of the rural writers to the island, the place of the island in the artistic topography of “rural prose”, and the features of its image become the subject of research. The study was conducted using literary and journalistic texts, as well as the epistolary heritage of F. Abramov, V. Astafiev, V. Soloukhin and E. Nosov. The focus of the attention is the paradoxical discrepancy between the island’s image that has rooted in mass consciousness as a place of historical memory that preserves the traditions of Russian life, and the restrained attitude towards the island from the “rural” writers’, whose works provided for the most profound development of this topic in the 1970s. The analysis of the reception and representation of Kizhi Island in “rural prose” is carried out taking into account and involving the historical and literary context, including comparison with the image of the island in the literature of the Thaw. The research materials show that Kizhi Island turns out to be a more important locus for the authors of the Thaw generation - A. Voznesensky, R. Rozhdestvensky, Yu. Kazakov and others, whose textual presentation of the island’s image turns out to be more significant, detailed, and endowed with important value characteristics. The article offers an explanation for the marginal position of the image of the famous island in the 1970s artistic topography of “rural prose”.