Abstract

The ‘travels through Russian in English’ of the four authors discussed here took place in different directions, and at different times. American artist Dale Pesman’s Russia and Soul is a work of anthropology, a retrospective mining of Pesman’s two years in the Siberian town of Omsk, 1990-1992, for what she learnt there of Russian dusha. Australian historian Maria Tumarkin’s memoir Otherland: a journey with my daughter recounts six weeks of travel with her 12-year-old daughter, Billie, in Russia and Ukraine in 2008 – Moscow, Kiev, St Petersburg, Babi Yar and Tumarkin’s birthplace of Kharkov – against the background of the author’s migration to Australia with her parents in 1989, aged 15. American literary scholar Maxim Shrayer’s Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is an account of the nine refusenik years, 1978-1987, from his eleventh till his twentieth birthday, in which he and his parents waited for permission to leave the Soviet Union. Finally, American writer Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure is a narrative of his growing up in the Soviet Union and the United States, after his migration there aged 7 with his parents in 1979. Pesman is the only one of these authors not born in the Soviet Union, and not from a Russian-speaking background. Her language travel, then, took her into Russian from English, whereas the other three all moved initially from Russian into English, with later return trips to post-Soviet Russia and Russian. All four authors are Jewish, and write of Russian-Jewish experience – in Pesman’s case, most obliquely, of how Jewishness shadows her provisional, adopted Russianness. All four texts invoke ways of being – cultural, psychological – which are possible in Russian, that is, among Russian-speakers, and equally, ways of being that emerge between Russian and English. Their engagement with these lingua-cultural ways of being is the focus of my paper.