| Sumario: | The three Russian writers under discussion in this article have all sought to affirm a spiritual dimension in man which is not catered for in a militantly materialist world or in a world seduced by glib notions of progress. In the case of Alexander Solzhenitsyn this has manifested itself as overt Christian faith. For Valentin Rasputin, the spiritual element may often appear as superstition or nostalgia. While, in Vladimir Voynovich's case, solemn musings are replaced by a boisterous comedy which encourages comparisons with some Western absurdist writers, but the starting-point is the same in all three writers, a non-descriptive individual in strictly-circumscribed time and space. The animal world in Russian literature provides rich material for critics. Beneath the bewildering surface of modern Russian literature one can discern more-palpable trends and genres than politically-motivated epithets such as dissident or conformist suggest. Hence Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin and Voynovich, different in many ways, do provide interesting parallels at times. For one thing, in certain of their works they can all be described as village writers. They all offer characters in a rural setting, who operate on intuition rather than reason, who are uneducated, ignorant or hostile to the technological age and yet undoubtedly possess an implied moral superiority.
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