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  • Remembering Alexander Vashchenko
  • Andrew Wiget (bio)

When Alexander Vashchenko passed away on 11 June 2013 after a short but terrible battle with cancer, all of us lost a professional colleague of international stature whose voice had become an essential part of the ongoing conversation in the humanities between Russia and North America.

Nearly thirty years have passed since I first met him in the summer of 1985. The study of Native American literature was then only an emergent phenomenon in the United States, and the first edition of the remarkable Heath Anthology of American Literature, which would fully integrate American Indian and other minority voices into the study of American literature, was still four years away. So I was astonished when I heard that a visiting Soviet scholar was going to speak on American Indian literature, a topic that surely must have been extraordinarily esoteric for scholars in his country. I had to attend. There I listened to a slim, intense, bookish-looking fellow present a very good reading, both sensitive and informed, of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. Afterward, as we talked, his eyes brightened with warmth and friendship, and his scholarly demeanor burst open like a sudden sunrise. He was patient as I bombarded him with questions, and he was anxious to know about my work with Indian writers and Indian tribes. I learned that he had been the young Moscow State University graduate student assigned to assist Momaday on his 1974 visit as the first Fulbright scholar to the Soviet Union. In 1989 I invited him to tour the Southwest with me, and the following year he invited me to the Soviet Union. We spent all of August 1990 together, as he took me all over Russia, from Karelia in the north to the Caucasus in the south. In trains and planes, cars and boats, we talked and talked, days and nights, telling stories and jokes, sharing personal experiences, our sense of our own country and [End Page ix] each other’s, discussing literature and teaching and writing. By then, I had learned to call him Sasha, the affectionate nickname for Alexander. He had become my friend.


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Alexander Vashchenko. Photograph by Andrew Wiget.

At that time Sasha was working at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, contributing articles on American Indian literature, canonical authors, and later Chicano writers to what would eventually be a new, five-volume history of American literature, definitive for the USSR. Later he would proudly show me the fifth and final volume and point out that he contributed articles on Indian writers to every volume. Sasha and I organized a very strong international conference at the Gorky Institute that brought Sasha and his colleagues together with the best American scholars from the Yale Project/Heath Anthology—Paul Lauter, Amy Ling, Hortense Spillers—with the aim of deepening our understanding of the dynamics of American literary history and [End Page x] canon formation. When I mentioned that I would like to speak with anyone who had been working with Siberian Native peoples, because I understood that their stories and traditions bore some similarity to those of American Indians, Sasha introduced me to one of the Gorky folklore scholars just returned from a Siberia expedition, Olga Balalaeva, who would later become not only my colleague but my spouse. Together the three of us organized a 1994 international expedition to the Siberian Khanty; it was the first of many trips to Siberia for Sasha and for me, and a life changer for both of us. A year later, Sasha brought out a two-volume, Russian-language collection that he edited called In Nature’s Heartbeat, one volume of which represented his selection of Native Siberian writers, and the other of his Russian translations of Native American writers. This remarkably ambitious, even visionary project anticipated by twenty years his recent anthology of Native Siberian literature in English, The Way of Kinship, and, of course, the present Vaella-Momaday dialogue. In the following year he published his translation of Black Elk Speaks and later his translations of Momaday. Sasha wrote articles and books on American Indian...

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