The Prodigal Steppe Son : STORIES FROM A SIBERIAN VILLAGE.<i> By Vasily Shukshin, translated by Laura Michael and John Givens (Northern Illinois Univ. Press: $35 cloth; $16 paper, 255 pp.)</i>

In the old ironbound days of the Soviet Union, with Stalin freshly embalmed and paranoia thick as car exhaust on the Arbat, a coarsely handsome young man showed up before the entrance committee of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, better known as the VGIK. The film school was a roost for Moscow’s intellectuals and so-called “Golden Youth,” the pampered children of the leaders of the revolution. A few working-class applicants were always admitted, but only as a symbolic token of the submissive peasants.

This applicant was different. Just out of the navy, he was still in military fatigues. Asked about his education, he shot back with a Siberian accent that he hadn’t had the time to read “War and Peace” because it was too thick. He gloried in what he himself described as his “Neanderthal backwardness and uncouthness.” Far worse, he was the son of a man executed as “an enemy of the people.” But he had boldness and a few protectors, and so entered Vasily Shukshin into Russian culture. In fact, he entered as an icon of the Soviet ironic culture that flourished between the toes of the state.

It was ironic in that any artistic expression had to say one thing to the censor and perhaps the exact opposite to the alert reader or viewer. The best known of Shukshin’s films, “Red Kalina Berry,” which he wrote, directed and starred in, purported to be about the redemption of a criminal by his return to honest rural life. In fact, however, the character cannot hide from his old gang, who track him down and kill him. The “uncouthness” of his antihero made Shukshin a true hero to Russians ready for an honest voice.

All of which might be a misleading introduction for his “Stories From a Siberian Village” because, with so much reason to write from a well of anger, he mainly marks these 25 short stories with humor, tolerance, poignancy, love and direct, brilliant description of Western Siberia:

“A winter landscape. Freezing cold outside. The village would darken the clear, frozen sky with its gray smoke--people were trying to keep themselves warm. If an old woman passed by carrying buckets on a yoke, you could even hear, through the double-paned windows, the crunch of the firmly packed snow under her felt boots. . . . People would stay at home, in the warmth. . . . They’d hit the bottle too, if they had one on hand, but drinking didn’t make things more cheerful.”

Maybe not more cheerful, but often more creative. A mechanic decides to build a perpetual motion machine out of bicycle wheels. A carpenter buys a microscope and is inspired to make his fame by killing all the microbes on Earth. An otherwise model worker refuses to labor on Saturdays so that he can steep in the perfect banya, building his coals, whisking himself like Cleopatra with a birch branch.

And sometimes things were more cheerful, as in the hilarious “Cutting Them Down to Size,” in which a rube interrogates visitors from the city--people with the arrogance to hold PhDs and arrive in a taxi with suitcase after suitcase--and reduces them through his loopy mix of science and insinuation to stuttering fury. Fair treatment for outsiders. Within the village, however, resides a live-and-let-live attitude. The men bluster, but it is the wives who beat them with pokers and wooden spoons. When an old woman denounces a man as a thief, the court takes into consideration that she is his mother-in-law, and the man exacts his own personal triumph over authority by taking the prosecutor for a wild truck ride with no hands on the steering wheel.

Of course, we know that Shukshin’s father won no such victory. The 1930s were the times of Soviet collectivization, when prosperous peasants were redefined as “enemies of the people” and a whisper was as good as a trial. So “From the Childhood Years of Ivan Popov,” one of the last sections in the collection, is different from the rest. “Popov” was the name of Shukshin’s mother’s family--the name she pinned on him to spare him the rough treatment meted out to children of “class enemies.” “What they accused my father of, I really don’t know. . . . However it may have been, our father was no more,” Shukshin writes. Here is both the bluntness and waywardness of memory, rather than the artifice of fiction, and colored so much by repressed fury that we can see again the rough country boy who stepped before the VGIK’s entrance committee.

Shukshin died of a heart attack at 45--only six months after the release of “Red Kalina Berry.” By that time, a legend had not only attached itself to him but had grown, suggesting that he had been murdered by enemies from the VGIK the same way his character had been killed in the film. Obviously, he will not die. After 30 years, these stories have come to us with an excellent introduction by John Givens to go with his and Laura Michael’s translation. For a filmmaker, Shukshin wrote pretty well.

One story, “I Believe,” is nothing less than a masterpiece, bearing within itself Russian depths of depression, philosophical funk, marital misunderstanding and vodka, all coming together in a whirlwind climax equal to Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls”: “The priest and Maksim danced with such fury and in such a frenzy that it didn’t seem strange that they were dancing. They either had to dance or rend the shirt on their breast and weep and gnash their teeth . . . . The plates and glasses on the table started clinking.

“Oh, I believe! I believe!”

Considering what had happened to Shukshin’s father, and what he knew of real life on the mud-bound steppe, it might seem illogical or dishonest to create a piece with so much energy. Not so. Defiant!