The question of humanity’s moral makeup has high priority in current sociopolitical and cultural discussions in the Soviet Union. At issue is whether a person is a “clean sheet” whose moral makeup represents nothing but the experience of and reactions to the surrounding environment, or, conversely, a “living soul” endowed with such mysterious and irrational faculties as love, mercy, and compassion. Concern about a lack of morality and spirituality in Soviet society increased significantly in the arts and media after the period of relative liberalization, the thaw, was over and another period, officially referred to now as “the period of stagnation,” began. This change took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Soviet literature of the time, pragmatism stood out as a primary cause for concern in the works of the derevenshchiki, the village writers. Their approach to this problem, however, was limited by their attempts to resolve it within the context of old and not necessarily adequate stereotyped oppositions: village versus city, nature versus technology, Russian versus western.