Roubles in Words, Kopeks in Figures AND OTHER STORIES by Vasily Shukshin; translated by Natasha Ward and David Iliffe (Marion Boyars: $14.95; 207 pp.)

Perhaps it is fashionable to suggest that if a Russian writer is considered subversive by the Soviet bureaucracy, then proper Western attention is due. Attention is due Vasily Shukshin because he is a first-rate storyteller--in the tradition of Gogol or Twain--in writing in defense of the “ordinary folk” and with a wonderful gift for the exaggerated, the grotesque, the language and poetics of the commonplace. So popular was Shukshin that thousands of ordinary Russians attended the funeral of the country-born actor, film director and writer when he died in 1974 at age 45.

In his excellent introduction, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet Union’s foremost poet, compares Shukshin to “the carpenter’s son from Galilee; one of his palms was firmly nailed to the country, the other to the town.”

In “Stefan,” a prisoner with three months to serve escapes to his native village because he is “homesick.” Captured at his coming-home party, Stefan sustains the dream of freedom through his fellow revelers. “Let them go on enjoying themselves . . . tell them tomorrow.” Tomorrow comes soon enough as his deaf-and-dumb sister learns of his reincarceration. “When she’d completely understood, her blue terrified eyes burned with such pain, such superhuman suffering that the policeman was silenced.”

Shukshin does not idealize about the common folk. Dreams for them are soul-destroying. This theme threads the 10 short stories, one radio play, and the longer prose allegory, translated vividly by Natasha Ward and David Iliffe.

In the best of his stories, “The Old Man’s Dying,” “The Sufferings of Young Vaganov” and “The Outsider,” the aspirations of the individual run up against the collective aspirations of a pragmatic society. And when they collide, our heroes are “drinking to a stupor,” depending like Hemingway heroes on vodka, the “giant killer,” to stave off consciousness. Says Sanya in “The Outsider,” “Life’s good . . . You felt . . . you’d suddenly grown enormously in stature and . . . could easily contemplate the ends of your life at once.”

Often these finely tuned stories turn off their accelerated ride with the abruptness of a punctured tire waffling off the freeway. Thus go all fantasies, instantly interrupted by illness, divorce, deception, imprisonment or death.

Unlike Dostoevsky’s spiteful “Underground Man,” Shukshin’s characters are vigorous even as their bodies are diseased.

We identify with their destinies because they are both suffering and hopeful. The Russian people identified with Shukshin’s destiny for precisely the same soul-searching reason.