Valentin Rasputin аnd Uzbek literature: reassembling village prose as nation building

Reception of Valentin Rasputin’s prose can be traced in Uzbek literature at different levels: the plot (the situation of war and women’s loneliness; the gap between generations), the characters (the opposition of tradition and modern people), ideas (adaptation of philosophical and ethical concepts of moral judgment and moral immortality) and the main conflict (an integral personality as rooted in tradition vs. a damaged personality as devoid of roots), which can unfold within an individual hero. However, the contrast between the village and the city is replaced here by the contrast between the generic as traditional and the individual as a threatening break with the ancestors and the disappearance of historical memory. If for Rasputin the village remained a place of moral patterns of behavior, albeit partially destroyed by modernization, and public discussion was to limit the effects of modernization, then in Uzbek prose, which consciously reassembles Rasputin’s plots, the reality of the village (kishlak) and the city is dependent on the reality of the home, as only space of conflict. The Uzbek writers do not consider modernization as a main threat, but rather the loss of ancestral memory, depicting the situation not in a dramatic way, but in a tragic way, as an internal conflict within an individual. We cite numerous examples to show how the symbols, images, and plot developments invented under the possible influence of Rasputin take on a philosophical rather than a social meaning. By doing so, the Uzbek literature should have rather affirmed the mission of the writer as a prophet capable of linking the idea of personality and the idea of generic memory, and thereby brought the discussion to the level of a general theory of personality and the general fate of Uzbekistan as an independent cultural world, in which the opposition of city and village is not so essential in comparison with a common national identity.