Village prose was a movement in Soviet literature beginning during the Khrushchev Thaw, which included works that focused on the Soviet rural communities. Some point to the critical essays on collectivization in Novyi mir by Valentin Ovechkin as the starting point of village prose, though most of the subsequent works associated with the genre are fictional novels and short stories. Authors associated with village prose include Aleksander Yashin, Fyodor Abramov, Boris Mozhayev, Vasily Belov, Viktor Astafyev, Vladimir Soloukhin, Vasily Shukshin, and Valentin Rasputin. Some critics also count Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn among the village prose writers for his short novel Matryona's Place.