SOURCE: “Russian Pastorale: Kazakov,” in Russian Writers: Notes and Essays, Random House, 1971, pp. 354-58.

In the following review, originally published in The New York Review of Books in 1964, Muchnic offers a positive assessment of Going to Town and discusses Kazakov's place in Soviet literature.

The title story of this collection [Going to Town and Other Stories] is a rather grim sketch of a carpenter who leaves the country to take his sick wife to Moscow. He is sure she will die there and hopes she will, for he has long since stopped caring for her and she has prevented his settling in the city. They drive off in their cart, she, tears streaming down her “hollow cheeks,” gazing on the countryside she loves, where she has spent her life; he, up front, gay and spruce, a ram's carcass beside him—he has just slaughtered the animal in a...