For his earlier books, there are those who never forgave him. His slavish pursuit of the Party line and open repudiation of his people's traditions are embarrassingly manifest in works that celebrate the (nonexistent) transformation of his native Chukotka into a Soviet paradigm. ... But by the late 1970s, as the slow literary thaw continued, he started to write differently. Perhaps influenced by the "derevenshchiki", the "village writers" who turned for their values to the unspoiled countryside, he began to extol precisely the Chukchi oral culture that he had once repudiated.