Hybridizing the canon: Russian-American writers in dialogue with Russian literature. Issue 3 (2nd July 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Furman, Yelena
• Is Part Of: Canadian Slavonic papers. Volume 58:Issue 3(2016)
• Page Start: 205
• Page End: 228
• Publication Date: 2016-07-02
• Subjects: Russian-American writers -- intertextuality -- hybrid identity -- Irina Reyn -- Lara Vapnyar -- Anya Ulinich; Slavic philology -- Periodicals; 891.8
• DOI: 10.1080/00085006.2016.1200226
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0008-5006

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Russian-American writers – that is, Russian-speaking Jews who immigrated to North America from the late 1970s to the early 1990s – have garnered both a wide readership and critical acclaim. Although they live in the United States and write in English, their works manifest a marked focus on Russian-related themes, including the frequent employment of Russian literature. Three Russian-American texts engage in sustained intertextual play: Irina Reyn's What Happened to Anna K . with Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina ; Lara Vapnyar's Memoirs of a Muse with the diary of Fedor Dostoevskii's mistress, Polina Suslova; and Anya Ulinich's Petropolis with Osip Mandel'shtam's poem "Na strashnoi vysote bluzhdaiushchii ogon'" ("At a terrifying height a wandering fire"). This article has two interrelated aims. The first is to demonstrate that, similar to postcolonial and other diasporic writers, Russian-American writers' intertextual use is inextricably linked with a negotiation of cultural identities. The second is to offer a close analysis of the ways in which Reyn's What Happened to Anna K ., Vapnyar's Memoirs of a Muse, and Ulinich's Petropolis recast Russian texts as Russian-American elaborations of cultural hybridity and immigrant sensibility.