Roubles in Words, Kopeks in Figures

When Vasily Shukshin died in 1974, tens of thousands of ordinary Russians attended the funeral. So popular was he, as actor, film director and writer, that even his enemies in the old Soviet regime felt compelled to make an appearance.

What the official bureaucrats found so subversive about Shukshin’s work, and what gave it such a broad appeal, was the way in which he allowed his characters to speak for themselves, providing an insight into what ordinary people felt and experienced in the Soviet Union of his day.

His stories depict, with a gentle humour and humanity, the frustrations, struggles and minor triumphs of the people who migrated, dispossessed and powerless, to the city from the country. Shukshin refuses overt moral pointing in his stories and anecdotes, choosing instead to render everyday working lives in a prose that leaves the ambiguity of experience intact.

This collection of Shukshin’s stories, one of which has been adapted as a play by the translators, is introduced with a survey of his career by the noted Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.