In Irkutsk Region, for the Year of Literature, a video book Farewell to Matyora will be created based on Valentin Rasputins story. More than 300 people have already taken part, chosen from hundreds of applications.

As reported by the Minister of Culture and Archives of the Irkutsk Region, Vitaly Baryshnikov, as part of the Year of Literature, a video book of “Farewell to Matyora” based on the novella by Valentin Rasputin will be created. The project, dedicated to the Year of Literature, was launched by the Irkutsk Academic Drama Theater named after N.P. Okhlopkov in early October 2014 and will be implemented in mid-March 2015, in time for the author’s birthday.
We remind you that until December 1, 2014, anyone wishing to take part in the project could send or provide on any electronic medium a video recording in which the participant of the contest expressively reads a short excerpt from a work of fiction. By December 20, 2014, the drama theater’s commission selected the best readers, each of whom read one page from Valentin Rasputin’s novella “Farewell to Matyora.” During this selection stage, the theater received more than seven hundred applications, each of which was reviewed by members of the organizing committee. At present, more than 300 participants have already been selected from them. Most of them are non-professional readers. However, the main criterion for selection by the organizing committee was not acting skill or artistic reading, but a person’s understanding of the essence of the work, their empathy and compassion for the characters in the novella. In the last days of January, the first recordings will begin of the project participants who passed the selection stage. All of them will take part in the creation of the video book “Farewell to Matyora.”
Vitaly Baryshnikov noted that the project’s geography is very extensive. The topic turned out to be so in demand and interesting to a wide range of people that, in addition to the Irkutsk Region—from the regional center to its northernmost territories—applications were sent from Moscow, Pskov, Crimea, and even Mexico.
Nevertheless, most of the project participants are residents of the Irkutsk Region, fellow countrymen of Valentin Rasputin. Soon, in the cities and towns of the Angara region: Irkutsk, Sayan, Bratsk, Tulun, Tayshet, Ust-Ilimsk, Cheremkhovo, Erbogachen, Kirensk, Nizhneudinsk, Usolye-Sibirskoye, — video recordings of the excerpts will begin. Recording will also take place in Ust-Uda, the writer’s small homeland. It is expected that outstanding figures of Russian culture will also be among the project participants. Despite this, priority in the implementation of the project is given precisely to the “people’s” performance of the work. This idea was supported by such well-known Russian literary figures as Pavel Fokin, Valentin Kurbatov, Pavel Basinsky, and Yevgeny Vodolazkin.
Specialist in Old Russian literature, writer, laureate of the Big Book award, and guest of the 2014 Literary Evenings, Yevgeny Vodolazkin expressed his attitude toward the project, saying: “The name Valentin Rasputin can be interpreted as the word ‘classic.’ Why should one read the classics? Because they are timeless. The timelessness of the classics is expressed in the fact that in contemporary and seemingly private matters they find a dimension common to different eras. The existence of a common dimension proves that everything, in one form or another, has already happened. To see this dimension is a gift of the few. Valentin Grigoryevich sees it. The novella ‘Farewell to Matyora’ stands alongside an epic novel. Is this not the story of Atlantis? It is relevant at all times. Is not some part of our life going under water every day? I mean not only the life of society, of the people. This can also concern each individual person. How much each of us calmly sends to the bottom within ourselves! Projects like the initiative of the Irkutsk Academic Theater are certainly needed today. True values—and this applies not only to literature—do not impose themselves; they are not aggressive. But that does not mean they should not be supported. There are perfectly worthy ways to remind people of these values. One of them is your project.”
Valentin Grigoryevich Rasputin was born into a peasant family in the village of Atalanka, Ust-Udinsky District, Irkutsk Region, on March 15, 1937; he is a widely known Russian prose writer, a representative of the so-called village prose. His novella “Farewell to Matyora,” first published in 1976, is dedicated to the tragedy associated with the flooding of one of the villages on the Angara River in connection with the construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station.
Based on materials from the press service of the Irkutsk city administration.