Valentin Rasputin
| Valentin Rasputin | |
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Rasputin in 2011
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| Born | Valentin Grigoriyevich Rasputin 15 March 1937 Atalanka, Irkutsk Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Died | 14 March 2015 (aged 77) Moscow, Russia |
| Alma mater | Irkutsk State University |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Notable works | Farewell to Matyora |
Valentin Grigoriyevich Rasputin (Russian: Валентин Григорьевич Распутин; 15 March 1937 – 14 March 2015) was a Russian writer. He was born and lived much of his life in the Irkutsk Oblast in Eastern Siberia. Rasputin's works depict rootless urban characters and the fight for survival of centuries-old traditional rural ways of life, addressing complex questions of ethics and spiritual revival.
Valentin Rasputin was born on 15 March 1937 in the village of Atalanka in Irkutsk Oblast of Russia. His father worked for a village cooperative store, and his mother was a nurse. Soon after his birth, the Rasputin family moved to the village of Atalanka in the same Ust-Uda district, where Rasputin spent his childhood. Both villages, which were located on the bank of the Angara River, do not exist in their original locations any more, as much of the Angara Valley was flooded by the Bratsk Reservoir in the 1960s, and the villages were relocated to higher ground. Later, the writer remembered growing up in Siberia as a difficult, but happy time. "As soon as we kids learned how to walk, we would toddle to the river with our fishing rods; still a tender child, we would run to the taiga, which would begin right outside the village, to pick berries and mushrooms; since young age, we would get into a boat and take the oars..." Rasputin is of no relation to the Tsarist confidant Grigori Rasputin.
When Rasputin finished the 4-year elementary school in Atalanka in 1948, his parents sent the precocious boy to a middle school and then high school in the district center, Ust-Uda, some 50 km away from his home village. He was the first child from his village to continue his education in this way.
Rasputin graduated from Irkutsk University in 1959, and started working for local Komsomol newspapers in Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk. He published his first short story in 1961.
An important point in Rasputin's early literary career was a young writers' seminar in September 1965 in Chita led by Vladimir Chivilikhin (), who encouraged the young writer's literary aspirations and recommended him for membership in the prestigious Union of Soviet Writers. Since then Rasputin has considered Chivilikhin his "literary godfather".
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