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Old Hunting Grounds and Other Stories by Yuri Kazakov (Paperback)
Loot Price: R389
Discovery Miles 3 890
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Old Hunting Grounds and Other Stories by Yuri Kazakov (Paperback)
Series: Old Hunting Grounds and Other Stories by Yuri Kazakov, 2
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Loot Price R389
Discovery Miles 3 890
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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In this second volume Kazakov presents more of his engaging
character-cameos and North Russian scenic compositions. His
pristine settings are once again living presences described with
the touch of a 'psychologist of nature', to quote one of his
admirers, the poet Andrei Voznesensky. This was a region whose
inhabitants as late as the second half of the 20th century were
still largely unaffected by the complexities of modernity, folk for
whom the great world was the primordial one of their surroundings:
an immediately-sensed universe extending from the near, and at
first glance ordinary, outwards to the heavens of the northern
lights and the very stars. It is or was until recently still
possible beside such places as the White Sea and its adjacent
forests and tundra to daily observe country people living in that
sort of integration with nature, accepting without question the
ocean, the land, and the seasons as the determining power in their
lives, and be hardly aware of any other; it was certainly possible
a generation ago in Kazakov's time, even in a nation which for
years had been frenetically industrialising and whose relation with
its environment was relentlessly exploitative. But in the cities as
well, including that modernising hothouse or engine which was the
Soviet Union's Moscow, some sense of that unity with nature still
lingers in these stories, and not merely because references to
climate are inescapable in Russian writing. Kazakov saw no
opposition between urbanised, technologically evolving humans and
the rest of the universe we call 'natural'. An intercity bus or
elektrichka or silver-bellied aeroplane was to him as remarkable,
but not more so, as any outgrowths produced by other organisms or
by inorganic matter. If his tales of hunting on land and whaling in
arctic waters predominate, if they have defined his milieu and
established his reputation, it was because to his retrospective
imagination those were in his time, and perhaps still are in ours,
clear if departing instances of that integration, that
give-and-take in nature, that sharing in an immemorial cycle of
life and of death that itself sustains life in its turn.
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