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269 The Second Wave: Preserving the Old in the New World World War II marked a watershed in the history of the Russian emigration and fundamentally altered the conditions and institutions that gave shape to its intellectual life. The conflict brought a second wave of emigration from Russia. Considerably smaller than the first, postrevolutionary wave, the second wave was made up of displaced people separated from their predecessors by decades of Soviet experience and, as a rule, less well educated and cosmopolitan. As the American historian of the emigration John Glad has put it: “While the second wave included a number of intellectuals, this group did not possess the ‘critical mass’ essential to maintain a cultural tradition abroad on the scale of either its predecessors or its successors in exile.”1 Members of the second wave were nonetheless among the first to begin the process of reestablishing émigré publishing in postwar Europe, notably the creation in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Meyerhoff in 1945 of the publishing house Posev and the periodicals Posev and Grani.2 More significantly for the history of émigré literary criticism though, the war shifted the center of gravity of the emigration westward, to the United States as firstwave émigrés fled the European cataclysm. They were, of course, part and parcel of a larger flow of refugees from Europe, including some of the leading thinkers of their time. Thanks to this influx of displaced talent, postwar America, flush from victory  The alter ego émigré literary criticism from world war ii to the end of the soviet union catharine theimer nepomnyashchy 13 270  catharine theimer nepomnyashchy on the world stage, was an extraordinary intellectual melting pot. The years following the war, moreover, witnessed the emergence of Soviet studies and the rapid growth of American universities. Demand for specialists in Russian language and literature in the academy was further fed by the onset of the Cold War and the escalating arms race. While only a handful of educational institutions in the United States had taught Russian language and literature before the war, Russian émigrés would play a major role in the rapid expansion of Russian and Soviet studies in the 1950s and 1960s and in shaping the education of the first large generation of American Slavic scholars. Emblematic of the emigration’s move to the West was the founding of Novyi zhurnal in New York in 1942 by Mark Aldanov and Mikhail Zeitlin.3 The journal represented a direct link with the prewar émigré tradition in that, as its title was meant to suggest, it was conceived as a new beginning in the New World for the longest lived of the first-wave émigré journals, Sovremennye zapiski. In fact Novyi zhurnal, which remains in existence to the present day, would go on to outstrip its forerunner, surviving longer than any other émigré journal. The journal’s editors remained true to the mission of its predecessor, and of mainstream prewar émigré journals and criticism as a whole, to preserve what they considered to be genuine Russian culture, its values and its texts, from the destruction and betrayal they were perceived to have undergone in the Soviet Union. The journal’s approach to literary criticism was thus conservative and largely isolated from Western literary critical and theoretical trends. Writing at the beginning of the 1970s, the first-wave émigré Roman Gul’, editor of Novyi zhurnal from 1966 to his death in 1986 and himself a prolific literary critic, divided the history of the journal up into four periods—from the founding of the journal to the end of World War II, from the end of the war to the Thaw, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, and from the mid-1960s into the 1970s. The latter three of these periods arguably serve as an effective outline of the evolution of Russian émigré culture as a whole during the postwar period, which witnessed the gradual fading of the aging and passing first wave and the appearance of the first harbingers of the third wave. With the cessation of hostilities in Europe, the journal reestablished contact with émigré cultural figures who had remained in Europe and published critical articles, memoirs, and documentary materials by and about major literary figures of the prerevolutionary period and the first wave of emigration, including Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Veidle, Zinaida Gippius, Boris Zaitsev, and Marina Tsvetaeva. The later periods outlined by Gul’ brought an increasing turn away from the isolation of emigration...

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