Rasputin 's daughter Maria died in the 2006 crash of S7 Airlines Flight 778 , and his wife died six years later . He died in Moscow on 14 March 2015 , a day short of his 78th birthday . Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church conducted his funeral service , and President Vladimir Putin paid his respects . ( In 2014 Rasputin had co-signed a letter by writers in support of Putin 's annexation of the Crimea . ) Rasputin is closely associated with a movement in post-war Soviet literature known as " village prose , " or sometimes " rural prose " ( деревенская проза ) . Beginning in the time of the Khrushchev Thaw ( оттепель ) , village prose was praised for its stylistic and thematic departures from socialist realism . Village prose works usually focused on the hardships of the Soviet peasantry , espoused an idealized picture of traditional village life , and implicitly or explicitly criticized official modernization projects . Rasputin 's 1979 novel '' Farewell to Matyora '' , which depicts a fictional Siberian village which is to be evacuated and cleared so that a hydroelectric dam can be constructed further down the Angara River , was considered the epitome of this genre . The opening paragraph below is a good example of Rasputin 's writing style ( exceptional even for the village prose writers ) , and the novel 's theme of natural cycles disrupted by modernization : '' Once more spring had come , one more in the never-ending cycle , but for Matyora this spring would be the last , the last for both the island and the village that bore the same name . Once more , rumbling passionately , the ice broke , piling up mounds on the banks , and the liberated Angara River opened up , stretching out into a mighty , sparkling flow . Once more the water gushed boisterously at the island ’s upper tip , before cascading down both channels of the riverbed ; once more greenery flared on the ground and in the greens , the first rains soaked the earth , the swifts and swallows flew back , and at dusk in the bogs the awakened frogs croaked their love of life . It had all happened many times before . '' ( From Rasputin 's novel '' Farewell to Matyora '' , translated by Antonina W. Bouis , 1979 ) Rasputin 's nonfiction works contain similar themes , often in support of relevant political causes . He directed particularly trenchant criticism at large-scale dam building , like the project that flooded his own hometown , and water management projects , like the diversion of the Siberian rivers to Central Asia . He argued that these projects were destructive not simply in an ecological sense , but in a moral sense as well
S7 Airlines Flight 778
S7 Airlines Flight 778
Valentin Rasputin