Mapping Happiness in the Russian Taiga: Mikhail Tarkovskii and the 'Happy People'

• In Event: Imagining the North in Russian Literature

Abstract

This paper focuses on the contemporary writer Mikhail Tarkovskii. Writing from, and, chiefly, about remote regions in the Russian taiga, he stands for the de-centering of literary production in contemporary Russia. His short story collection Za piat’ let do schastiia (Five Years Before Happiness, 2001), as well as his contribution to Dmitrii Vasiukov’s documentary Schastlivye liudi (Happy People, 2008), revive two prominent trends of Soviet literature that ignored the metropolis in favor of the periphery: journalistic-educational travel writing and village prose. This paper explores how both the story collection and the film reveal an intriguing correlation between the changing roles of the Russian colonizers and the local Siberian population, and their conceptions of happiness.

Author

• Tatiana Filimonova, The College of Wooster