American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

INTRODUCTION: RUSSIAN-AMERICAN FICTION

Author(s): Amelia Glaser
Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 55, No. 1, SPECIAL FORUM ISSUE:
RUSSIAN-AMERICAN FICTION (SPRING 2011), pp. 15-18
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
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INTRODUCTION: RUS SI AN-AMERICAN FICTION

Amelia Glaser, University of California, San Diego

This collection of articles was born of many conversations about the Am

can fiction by Russian émigrés that has appeared in bookstores over the past
decade, much of it meeting quick and unprecedented success. It is clear t
the writings of Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, Lara Vapnyar, Keith Gessen
Olga Grushin, and others have gained a foothold in American literature, pus
ing an American reading public to think more about Russia. Does this,
have asked one another, merit consideration as a branch of Russian literatur
Yury Lotman reminds us that in understanding a literary epoch, we sho
look not merely at what writers publish, but also at what they read.1 As the
ticles collected here demonstrate, these works have, in numerous and var
ways, helped to revitalize American fiction. But beyond the merits of th
books in their own right, a compelling reason for Slavic Studies scholar
take an interest in the writers discussed here lies in the Russian literature the
read, reference, and in a sense, translate for an American readership. A
Ulinich weaves Mandelstam's Tristiia into her 2007 novel Petropolis, Gar
Shteyngart channels Goncharov and Gogol in his 2006 Absurdistan. La
Vapnyar in Memoirs of a Muse takes an avid reader of Russian literatur
search of her American Dostoevsky.
In fact, some of these writers have, in addition to their own literary pursu
done a service to English-language readers and Slavic literature scholars
helping to publish Russian literature in English translation: Shteyngart offers
short introduction to a recent edition of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (a
edition which, I might add, sports a cover photo of an intimidating young h
ster in dark glasses); Keith Gessen and Anna Summers recently translated an
edited a volume of Ludmila Petrushevskaya's "scary fairy tales."2 Russian

1. Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Sh
man (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 127.
2. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Mode
Library, 2004); Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill
Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, trans. Keith Gessen and Anna Summers. (New York:
guin, 2009).

SEEJ, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2011): p. 15-p. 18 15

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16 Slavic and East European Journal

erature, it would seem from these examples, is at once high culture and counter
culture, immigrant punk and the quintessence of old-world sophistication.
The articles in this issue broach the topic of how Slavic Studies scholars
might integrate American fiction into a study of the Russian literary canon in
a transnational modernity. Yelena Furman reminds us that most Russian
American writers who have published fiction since 2000 are actually Russian
American-Jewish writers. Indeed, Jews make up a majority of recent Russian
immigrants to North America. Furman writes, "These hyphenated designa
tions have made themselves felt in literary production, hardly surprising for a
group prizing its connection to 'high' Russian culture." Furman suggests that
this recent phenomenon, far from constituting the kind of travel writing that
had characterized Russian encounters with the United States in the early
twentieth century, is very much a hybrid endeavor, drawing from a transna
tional and multiethnic experience.
Yasha Klots places Russian-American writers in the context of Russian
travel writing. Korolenko, Ilf and Petrov, Esenin, Gorky, and Mayakovsky all
visited the United States around the turn of the twentieth century and devel
oped a tradition of comparing New York to Russia's cities, particularly St. Pe
tersburg. Klots distinguishes between late-Imperial and Soviet accounts of the
U.S., accounts which, he observes, approximate "letters home," and the more
recent writers, many of whom pattern New York on the Imperial Russian cap
ital St. Petersburg, effectively reinscribing a Russian cultural tradition into an
American context. Familiar Russian landmarks gain American equivalents—
the Hudson and New York Harbor reflect the Neva and Gulf of Finland. The
same kind of localization places the Russian signposts in Russian-American
texts. Brooklyn, for Shteyngart's obese post-Soviet immigrant protagonist, is
an "Oblomovian paradise"; the twin towers of the World Trade Center remind
him of "Stalinist gigantomania." Irina Reyn's What Happened to Anna K. pat
terns Tolstoy's Petersburg and Moscow (along with his trains) onto New York.
The Russian-American literary encounter puts the narrator in a good posi
tion to critique American-born novelists' fictional approaches to Eastern Eu
rope. Anya Ulinich, in her 2008 short story "The Nurse and the Novelist,"
creates a Soviet Jewish nurse who accuses an American Jewish writer (with
a striking resemblance to Jonathan Safran Foer) of subordinating painful his
torical events to the psychology of the hero: "In your novels, past calamities
are nothing but milestones of self-discovery."3 Adrian Wanner discusses the
sexual politics of a similar kind of encounter embedded in Lara Vapnyar's fic
tion. When the male protagonist Mark in Memoirs of a Muse learns that Vap
nyar's Tanya is from Russia, he quizzes her about Dostoevsky—"What are
the names of Alyosha Karamazov's mentor, the girl that Stavrogin raped, and

3. Anya Ulinich, "The Nurse and the Novelist," PEN (2008), http://www.pen.org/viewmedia
.php/prmMID/2812/prmID/1502.

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 Introduction: Russian-American Fiction Special Issue 17

Dostoevsky's wife? Quick!"4 Mark is drawn to Russian literature by the al

lure of sexuality and domination, and Tanya spends a remarkable amount of
time creating the kind of narrative he desires. Vapnyar's ignorant and domi
nant male American characters are countered by the playful dissimulation of
her female Scheherazades. Russian literature represents high culture to Mark,
and Tanya is happy to package it for her audience. (To what extent, the reader
may ask, is Vapnyar doing the same for me?)
Olga Grushin, who came from the Soviet Union to the U.S. to attend
Emory University, has experienced, as Kristin Welsh puts it, "an expatriation
of privilege." Grushin's status as the first Russian citizen to graduate from an
American university gave her an unofficial ambassadorial role early in her
life. Grushin continues to cultivate her public persona as the progeny of So
viet-U.S. relations. Her official website notes that she was an interpreter for
former President Jimmy Carter, and features a handful of her own childhood
drawings. Welsh highlights the importance of early twentieth-century émigré
literature to Grushin's persona and authorial voice, and observes that
Grushin avoids the pseudo-autobiography that characterizes many of her
Russian-American colleagues. Grushin's work conjures classics of Soviet
counter-culture like Vysotsky, Erofeev, and Sorokin in her post-Soviet Amer
ican novels. The title character in The Dream Life of Sukhanov, like the pro
tagonist in Erofeev's Moscow to the End of the Line, ends up back in
Moscow, "mocked by demons."5 Grushin's American readers will be more
likely to recognize references to canonical Russian culture and established
representatives of Russian-American literature like Nabokov, who, Welsh
demonstrates, serves as both a literary model and a foil against which
Grushin develops her own authorial voice. Taken together, the visible traces
of Russian, Soviet, and émigré culture make Grushin's novels themselves
into points of contact between Russia and the United States in the aftermath
of the Cold War.
It is significant that since the end of the Cold War, a group of writers has
emerged that is not always critiquing Russian culture, or American culture, as
such. Rather, they are engaging with both cultures simultaneously, allowing
the intersection to reveal substantial differences as well as unexpected simi
larities. Thus, Shteyngart's "Secretary of Multicultural Affairs" in Absurdis
tan perverts Soviet authoritative discourse and American college politics
alike.6 In Absurdistan the collision of two seemingly irreconcilable cultural
perspectives is exaggerated. However, all of the works discussed in this
forum, coming from the transnational perspective of the Russian-born Amer

4. Lara Vapnyar, Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 93.
5. Olga Grushin, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (New York: Penguin, 2007), 265.
6. For an excellent discussion of Absurdistan and Baron-Cohen's film "Borat" in the context
of Soviet-American Cold-War relations, see Steven S. Lee, "'Borat,' Multiculturalism, 'Mnogo
natsional'nost','" Slavic Review 67.1 (April 1,2008): 19-34.

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18 Slavic and East European Journal

ican writer, function as syntheses of decades of Russian-American cultural

antagonism. The American audience for these novels—the same audience,
perhaps, that reads a disproportionate number of Russia-related stories in the
New Yorker or N+1—includes readers born in Russia, readers born in the
U.S. with roots in Eastern Europe, and those who simply love Russian books
and are drawn to the kind of contemporary writer, be it Vikram Seth, Elif Ba
tuman, or Lara Vapnyar, who also loves Russian books.
The general interest in Russian-American fiction points to the mounting
cultural capital of things Russian, a phenomenon due in no small part to Rus
sian émigré culture. A restaurant review in the New Yorker last year enticed
readers to "munch on pretzel-like sushki, 'little dry things'—Russians give
them to teething babies—while contemplating the Martini list. The cucumber
version tastes like pickle juice, but the cranberry one, bobbing with rubies, is
a nice pick. 'Irene?' a businessman says to a bartender. 'Oh, Irina.' The scene
is starting to pick up."7 The writers considered in this issue speak in part to
the kind of American fascination with a Russian-American milieu described
here, for all the political and aesthetic problems that may entail. But they also
speak to the transnational relevance of Russian literature. In this sense, might
we not read these writers not only as American authors, but also as inter
preters of Russian culture?

7. Lauren Collins, "Tables for Two: Mari Vanna," http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/

tables/2010/05/24/100524gota_GOAT_tables_collins.

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