Money For Maria And Borrowed Time: Two Village Tales
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
From the windswept villages of rural Siberia comes a pair of quietly devastating novellas by one of Soviet Russia's most celebrated prose writers, Valentin Rasputin. Money for Maria chronicles the desperate plight of a village shopkeeper whose family scrambles to cover a financial shortfall before authorities close in, while Borrowed Time presents a dying old woman's final days as her scattered children gather, each carrying the weight of lives lived far from home. Together, these two village tales form a profound portrait of rural Soviet life — its moral economy, its communal bonds, and the quiet tragedies that unfold far from the centres of power. Translated with sensitivity by Kevin Windle and Margaret Wettlin, the prose carries the rhythm of oral storytelling, spare yet deeply felt. Rasputin stands as a towering figure in the Village Prose movement that swept Soviet literature in the 1960s and 70s, a literary current that turned against urban modernism to argue for the enduring spiritual and moral worth of traditional rural Russia. His work neither romanticises nor condescends — it bears witness. These two novellas illustrate his mastery of psychological depth and moral ambiguity, asking uncomfortable questions about collective responsibility and the cost of forgetting where one comes from. Readers drawn to the ethical urgency of Tolstoy or the rural melancholy of Turgenev will find in Rasputin a twentieth-century heir whose final pages linger long after the book is closed.
Author: Valentin Rasputin
Format: Hardback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
From the windswept villages of rural Siberia comes a pair of quietly devastating novellas by one of Soviet Russia's most celebrated prose writers, Valentin Rasputin. Money for Maria chronicles the desperate plight of a village shopkeeper whose family scrambles to cover a financial shortfall before authorities close in, while Borrowed Time presents a dying old woman's final days as her scattered children gather, each carrying the weight of lives lived far from home. Together, these two village tales form a profound portrait of rural Soviet life — its moral economy, its communal bonds, and the quiet tragedies that unfold far from the centres of power. Translated with sensitivity by Kevin Windle and Margaret Wettlin, the prose carries the rhythm of oral storytelling, spare yet deeply felt. Rasputin stands as a towering figure in the Village Prose movement that swept Soviet literature in the 1960s and 70s, a literary current that turned against urban modernism to argue for the enduring spiritual and moral worth of traditional rural Russia. His work neither romanticises nor condescends — it bears witness. These two novellas illustrate his mastery of psychological depth and moral ambiguity, asking uncomfortable questions about collective responsibility and the cost of forgetting where one comes from. Readers drawn to the ethical urgency of Tolstoy or the rural melancholy of Turgenev will find in Rasputin a twentieth-century heir whose final pages linger long after the book is closed.