Valentin Grigor'evich Rasputin made his name as one of the foremost writers of "village prose" with four novellas written in the late 1960s to the mid 1970s achieving particular prominence with "Proshchanies Materoi" (translated as Farewell to Matera, 1979) in 1977. Whereas other derevenshchiki (writers of village prose) told about disappearing villages; the values and traditions nurtured there; and of European Russia in their works, Rasputin described the countryside of his own childhood on the banks of the Angara River in Siberia. Not only did he effectively bring village prose to an end, but he also enriched contemporary Russian literature with his use of the language and speech of native Siberians and with his research into the history and ethnography of Siberia. With the possible exception of Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin is, according to Gerald E. Mikkelson in his introduction to Siberia, Siberia (1996), "the most gifted and influential prose writer...