Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora

Introduction

3 Introduction THIS BOOK IS ABOUT a group of contemporary Sovietborn émigrés who left their country of origin to become writers in languages other than Russian. Even though they have abandoned their native tongue as a medium of literary expression, most of them maintain, or manufacture, a strong Russian identity in their fictionalized self-representation. Paradoxically , as Jews, which many of these writers are, they managed to become fully recognized as “Russians” only outside of Russia. While they have received a friendly or even enthusiastic response from readers and critics in the West, the reception of their books in Russia has been indifferent at best or hostile at worst. The territorial and linguistic move out of Russia into a constructed “Russianness” for foreign consumption raises a host of questions about transnational authenticity, the role of language in a writer’s national categorization, the function of cultural stereotypes in the fashioning of an ethno-national identity, and the value of Russianness as a brand in today’s global literary economy. Rather than representing isolated, “exotic” cases, it is my contention that the writers under discussion here need to be considered as part of a growing and understudied phenomenon of translingual diaspora literature. There is nothing unusual per se about dwelling and writing in multiple linguistic universes, of course. Authors using a language other than their native tongue have become a common phenomenon in a period of porous borders and increased international mobility, when many have embraced a foreign language as a consequence of emigration, as the lingua franca of a former colonial empire, or out of a deliberate aesthetic choice.1 The most prominent bilingual Russian writer of the past century is Vladimir Nabokov, but he is certainly not the only one, as Elizabeth Beaujour has shown in her pioneering study of members of the First Russian Emigration after the Bolshevik Revolution who became writers in French or English.2 These “White émigrés” were followed by three more major waves of out-migration from the territory of the Soviet Union: the flow of refugees in the wake of World War II known as the Second Wave, the mostly Jewish and dissident Third Introduction 4 Wave of the 1970s, and, finally, the Fourth Wave caused by the onset of perestroika , the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the economic and political turmoil of the 1990s. The most recent, post-Soviet wave differs in several respects from the preceding three. While for most of the twentieth century the motivation for emigration was mainly political, the latest migration is as much driven by economic dissatisfaction. At the same time, the relocation to a new country does not have the seemingly irrevocable finality that such a move had during the Soviet period. At least in theory, a return to the home country is always possible , and visits back and forth are a common practice. As a result, the notion of “exile,” which has been the prevalent paradigm with regard to Soviet émigré literature, no longer applies to what has become a much more fluid situation. Rather than the common trope of victims of adverse historical and political circumstances, these new émigrés are better described as agents who are capitalizing on opportunities for personal enhancement. In this sense, they are part of a larger stream of transnational migrants in today’s global economy. The writers discussed in this book belong to the Third and Fourth Waves of emigration, but are part of a similar age cohort. Mainly in their thirties and forties by now, they either left the Soviet Union as children or teenagers in the company of their parents, or as young adults when emigration became a more widely available option in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike Nabokov and other authors of the First Wave, who had established themselves as Russian writers before switching to English or French in midlife , they never published anything in their native idiom. In spite of their personal bilingualism, as authors they are, as Elizabeth Beaujour would put it, “monolingual writers in an adoptive tongue,”3 or—if we want to borrow the terminology proposed by Steven Kellman—they belong to the category of “monolingual translinguals” rather than “ambilinguals.”4 This monolingualism makes them quite different from the exile writers studied in Beaujour ’s monograph. Having no prior status as Russian writers, they are not affected by the wrenching experience of “betraying” a previously established idiom of literary expression, exemplified in Nabokov’s...