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Introduction I n N i k o l a i C h e r n y s h e v s k y ’ s What Is to Be Done? one of the protagonists feigns suicide yet goes to America. Conversely, in Fedor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment,the antagonist,Svidrigailov,announces: “I’m going to America” yet commits suicide. When in America—“on the other shore,”as Russians sometimes put it— Russian émigré characters and writers often feel that, although they have now acquired a new life, this life approximates a posthumous experience. All their previous relationships and obligations seem irrelevant. When, for example, a merchant in Vladimir Bogoraz’s novella Avdotia and Rivka (1902) tries to persuade Avdotia, an émigré, to marry him in New York even though she still has a husband back home, he argues: “Russia is there, and what’s here is America. It’s as if you had died and found yourself in the Other World.”1 Some eighty years later, the writer Sergei Dovlatov, an émigré himself, confesses that for him America offers the hope of a revitalized postmortem experience, i.e., of living in a new world without dying in the old one. These literary examples hail from different periods but share an identical symptomatic perception of America. Although the country across the ocean had already begun to acquire concrete historical features in the Russian mind by the last quarter of the eighteenth century,2 connotations of the Other World, the land on the other side of earthly existence,still lurk in the background of literary texts about the New World. This mythological perception of the New World is not exclusively Russian. From the moment of its discovery, America has offered a universal object of projection for Europeans.A utopia finally located,it represents the materialization of mankind’s dreams about the Golden Age and Paradise. There is, as Sigmund Skard notes, something fantastic about the image of America in different cultures, and utopian images like the “paradisiac city of Philadelphia” can be found, for example, in early English texts about 4 Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York America.3 But in Russia the mythological concept gained a specificity and a concrete form that persisted through many eras and appeared in the works of very different authors, and thus deserves special scholarly attention. As we know, each country, in conformity with its geographical location, cultural traditions and the demands of the historical moment, discovers its own New World.4 Russia has always claimed a special association with America,a parallel recognized by other nations,because of the two countries’ relative youth,rapid development over the last two centuries,vast territories, and social experimentation, not to mention the fact that Russia literally discovered America from the other side, by crossing the Bering Strait.Thus, we can view Peter the Great’s words commanding discoverers to ascertain “whether Asia meets America” (skhoditsia li Aziia s Amerikoi) as a trope defining Russian-American cultural studies. Perhaps no other country has so often compared itself with and contrasted itself to America (and provoked other countries to make such comparisons)5 as Russia. Indeed, Russians today still perceive the world primarily as bipolar and believe that its fate depends on Russian–American relations, even if for other countries—and for America herself—the situation might seem different. “The American text” of Russian literature, like “the Petersburg text” discussed by Vladimir Toporov,6 exhibits two modes, one positive, one negative. The conception of America as the Other World in its idyllic, paradisal version is present, for example, in Alexander Herzen’s early drama William Penn (1839), which refers to America as “the promised land.” By contrast, the macabre otherworldliness of the proverbial “land beyond the ocean” is made explicit in the titles of travelogues written by Russian radicals, such as Vladimir Korolenko’s “Fabrika smerti” (Factory of Death) or Maxim Gorky’s “Gorod zheltogo d’iavola” (City of the Yellow Devil). Significantly, the most influential literary texts of the nineteenth–early twentieth centuries belong to this second mode. As Hans Rogger notes: “Most of Russia’s most important and influential thinkers and writers— Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Herzen, and the Slavophiles; Populists and Marxists…came to America,whether in thought or in person,with negative preconceptions or ready to be disenchanted.”7 The present book studies this myth of America as the Other World at the moment of transition from its Russian to its Soviet version. While in prerevolutionary...

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