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134 Chapter Five The Rise of the “Russian Debutantes” G A RY S H T E Y N G A RT ’ S C O M P L A I N T in his 2005 interview with Radio Liberty that “our young generation [of Russian immigrants ] doesn’t write anything”1 has become outdated very fast. Shteyngart himself probably would have been rather incredulous had he been told that just a few years after the appearance of his debut novel he would be one among many successful Russian immigrant writers active in the United States. A whole spate of novels and story collections by Russian-Americans has appeared in recent years. In spite of some obvious commonalities among these newly emerged authors, there are also important differences in the style, content, and genre of their books. In order to assess these “Russian debutantes” as a collective phenomenon, it is necessary to address their individual contributions to the genre of Russian-American immigrant fiction, in particular with regard to their literary self-fashioning as writers with multiple identities and the role that their “Russianness” plays in that project. In what follows, I will try to give a preliminary assessment of this stillunfolding phenomenon. The authors discussed in the first three subchapters display an increasingly problematic attitude toward a stable notion of a national or ethnic identity. Conversely, the author addressed in the last subchapter stands out from the others by positing herself firmly as a “Russian writer” and by assuming a conservative poetics reminiscent of Andreï Makine. In their totality, these Russian-born authors have come to form a vibrant subgroup of contemporary American fiction, and they have made Russianness a sought-after brand on the publishing market. As Masha Gessen observed in the Russian magazine Snob in 2009 with only a slight touch of hyperbole: “It is fashionable to be ‘Russian,’ it is fashionable to write about it, it is fashionable to be the editor or agent of a ‘Russian-American writer.’ Or, rather, for an American writer today, it is best to be Russian.”2 The Rise of the “Russian Debutantes” 135 THE IMMIGRANT BILDUNGSROMAN IN FRAGMENTS: DAVID BEZMOZGIS’S NATASHA AND ELLEN LITMAN’S THE LAST CHICKEN IN AMERICA David Bezmozgis’s Natasha (2004) and Ellen Litman’s The Last Chicken in America (2007) share several characteristics with regard to content and form. Both books are story collections which, when read in their entirety, crystallize into a sort of skeletal autobiographical bildungsroman that combines a coming-of-age narrative with an account of the gradual integration of a Russian immigrant protagonist into North American society. Many of the issues that arise belong to the classic staples of immigrant literature— initial linguistic inadequacy, disorientation and alienation in the face of an unfamiliar culture, material difficulties, the necessity of having to accept menial jobs, depression and loneliness, intergenerational conflict paired with a sense of moral duty to one’s family members, the vapid materialism of the “American dream.” Even though both Bezmozgis and Litman display a dry sense of humor, their account of the Russian-Jewish-American immigrant experience is on the whole more traditional and more earnest than Shteyngart ’s burlesque satire. At the same time, both of them refuse to couch their plot in a grand narrative. Their books present kaleidoscopic snapshots of a potential, unwritten “phantom novel,” as it were, where the reader is called upon to fill in the missing gaps. Similarly, the approach to their own multiple identities remains tentative and explorative. David Bezmozgis’s biography resembles Gary Shteyngart’s inasmuch as he also came to North America as a child in the wave of the Soviet-Jewish emigration of the late 1970s. Born in Riga in 1973, Bezmozgis moved to Toronto with his parents in 1980, where he grew up and attended Hebrew school before graduating from McGill University as an English major and moving on to film school at the University of Southern California. He directed a number of documentaries, but nothing indicated that he was planning to become a fiction writer before he burst into the national spotlight in 2003, when in the span of only three months three of his short stories appeared in the New Yorker, Zoetrope, and Harper’s. He also secured a contract with the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which apparently had decided to make Bezmozgis “its hottest new property.”3 The release in 2004 of Bezmozgis’s first (and thus far only) book, Natasha, a slim...

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