A director of five award-winning movies, a popular and prizewinning actor in more than twenty motion pictures in just sixteen years, and a writer with more than 130 short stories, 12 works for stage and screen, and 3 full-length novels to his credit, Vasilii Makarovich Shukshin was the most visible and prolific Soviet Russian artist of the 1960s and early 1970s. His works reached more people in more media than perhaps any other artist in the two decades following Joseph Stalin's death. Indeed, Shukshin's synthesis of his three creative personae--actor, director, and writer--not only made him a cultural phenomenon in his day but also blurred the boundary between his fiction and movies, an outcome that had a genre-shaping effect on Soviet literature and cinema. His dialogue-driven short stories--as lively, laconic, and luminous as the movies--revitalized that genre in Soviet literature, while his movies, bearing the unmistakable imprint of their creator's triple...