One of the first Village Prose writers was Yuri Kazakov. In his short stories about life in remote Russian villages, Kazakov was able to combine traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky with traditions of Turgenev and Bunin and created a unique style using psychological parallelism in lyrical prose. Through the aspects of village, nature, time, and native language, Yuri Kazakov exposed the life of the marginals. He was interested in individuals and their personal feelings and thoughts. He did not look at individuals as a part of society but rather as a part of and the creation of nature. Therefore, he found his characters in the remote Siberian villages where the Soviet regime and propaganda minimally influenced people’s lives and their traditional values. His characters cannot be characterized as simply good or bad. Through his characters, Kazakov investigated and explored the complexity of human nature, emotions, and motifs. In his stories, he was able to masterfully unfold human souls and draw their psychological portraits to address timeless philosophical questions about the purpose of live, moral choices, unity of people and nature

Cette thèse présente la première monographie française sur le grand écrivain russe et sibérien Victor Astafiev. Peu traduite en français, son œuvre importante (15 volumes) est généralement considérée par la critique comme s’inscrivant dans la veine de la prose rurale qui se développa en Russie à partir des années 70. Cependant, la biographie de l’écrivain et la multiplicité des thèmes qu’il aborde (société, guerre, musique, sons et nature) impose une remise en question de cette interprétation. L’auteur de la thèse s’attache à analyser finement les textes mis en contexte, à étudier l’évolution et la spécificité linguistique de leur écriture pour situer Astafiev dans la tradition de la grande littérature russe et faire apparaitre la profondeur et l’actualité de ses écrits. Le volume II livre une série de traductions inédites, annotées et commentées, ainsi que les versions reconstituées de chansons dont les textes révèlent un trésor de la culture populaire de l’époque. / This thesis presents the first French monograph on the great Russian and Siberian writer, Viktor Petrovich Astafiev. His important work (15 volumes), little-translated into French, is generally praised by critics as taking place within the same framework of the Village Prose, which started growing in Russia from the seventies onwards. However, the biography of the writer and the multiple themes which he takes up (society, war, music, sounds and nature) call into question this interpretation. The thesis author attempts to carry out a shrewd analysis of the texts placed within their context and to study the linguistic development as well as the specificity of Astafiev writings in order to situate him in the tradition of the great Russian literature and to highlight the depth and the topicality of his work. The second volume delivers a whole series of unpublished translations, duly annotated and commented as well as restored versions of songs, the texts of which reveal a treasure of the popular culture in the context of that time.