“It seems there are no grounds to believe, but I believe that the West will not get its hands on Russia,” Mr. Rasputin said in a series of conversations that first appeared in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya and were published in 2007 as a book called “Valentin Rasputin: Pain of the Soul.” “It’s not possible to drive all patriots to the grave, and there are more and more of them. And if they were driven to the grave, the coffins would rise upright and move to defend their lands.” He also defended Joseph Stalin.

In a flurry of commentary after his death, conservatives praised Mr. Rasputin as a keeper of the Russian soul, and liberals, even while praising his writing, expressed concern about his nationalist, Stalinist and anti-Semitic views. For example, he told The New York Times Magazine, in an interview published in 1990, that Jews bore responsibility for the terror that followed the Bolshevik Revolution and that “their guilt is great.”

Mr. Rasputin’s books sold millions of copies under communism, and toward the end of the Soviet era he received major state awards. But he and the other village prose writers, with their alternately romantic and brutal portraits of peasant life, were seen by some members of the Communist establishment as deviating from the socialist realism that the state usually demanded of artists and writers.

Valentin Grigoriyevich Rasputin was born on March 15, 1937, in the village of Ust-Uda in what is now the Irkutsk region. His parents, Grigory and Nina, were peasants. After completing primary school in the village of Atalanka, he had to travel, alone, to another town to continue his education in the hungry postwar years — an experience he portrayed in the story “French Lessons,” published in 1973.