Yefim Dorosh and His 'A Village Diary': Observing the Rural-Urban Transformation in Russia and Rostov

Abstract

Citation: Nikulin А. (2019) Yefim Dorosh and His 'A Village Diary': Observing the Rural-Urban Transformation in Russia and Rostov. Mir Rossii, vol. 28, no 4, pp. 172–192
(in Russian). DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2019-28-4-172-192

This article reviews the peasant studies of the writer and literary critic, Yefim Yakovlevich Dorosh and describes the milestones of his creative biography. In the first part of the article, special attention is paid to the formation of Dorosh not only as a writer, but also as an original researcher. I show that the theme of the relationship of the peasantry with the city as a peculiar symbiosis of peasant-urban culture was central to the works of Dorosh. The remainder of the article is devoted to an analysis of the first and the last essays in the collection of his works titled “Half Rainy, Half Sunny: A Village Diary”. Particular attention is paid to his analysis of the transformations in urban-rural relations between Rostov and the surrounding villages in the essays of 1954–1955 and 1967. I argue that Dorosh was a pioneer in the study of the informal urban-rural economy in Soviet Russia. I also emphasize that it was Dorosh who noted a certain positive value of the elements of entrepreneurship which the Soviet ideology ignored or attempted to denigrate. In the conclusion, I discuss the significance of the creative heritage and the method employed by Dorosh for studies in rural-urban transformations in contemporary Russia.