Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York: America and Americans in Russian Literary Perception

by Milla Fedorova

Overview

Yankees in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in New York examines the myth of America as the Other World at the moment of transition from the Russian to the Soviet version. The material on which Milla Fedorova bases her study comprises a curious phenomenon of the waning nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—pilgrimages to America by prominent Russian writers who then created travelogues. The writers' missions usually consisted of two parts: the physical journey, which most of the writers considered as ideologically significant, and the literary fruit of the pilgrimages.

Until now, the American travelogue has not been recognized and studied as a particular kind of narration with its own canons. Arguing that the primary cultural model for Russian writers' journey to America is Dante's descent into Hell, Federova ultimately reveals how America is represented as the country of "dead souls" where objects and machines have exchanged places with people, where relations between the living and the dead are inverted.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609090852
Publisher:	Northern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2013
Series:	NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	389
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Milla Fedorova is Assistant Professor in Russian Literature at Georgetown University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Citation xi

Introduction 3

Part I Bolsheviks in New York

1 Pre-Revolutionary Discoveries of America 25

Korolenko and Gorky

2 Post-Revolutionary Columbuses 52

Esenin and Mayakovsky

3 Automobile Journeys of the 1930s 73

Pilniak and Ilf and Petrov

Part II The American Text of Russian Literature

4 Recurrent Subtexts and Motifs in American Travelogues 101

Part III Yankees in Petrograd

5 Reverse American Travelogues 193

Conclusion From Dante's Inferno to Odysseus's Ithaca 218

Appendix 1 Lexical and Grammatical Neologisms in Pilniak's OK 227

Appendix 2 The Transatlantic Journey 233

Notes 235

Bibliography 273

Index 291

What People are Saying About This

Peter Rollberg

This thought-provoking book profits from the author's intimate knowledge of Russian and American culture, her analytical prowess, and her dry sense of humor. Fedorova's study is a genuinely new contribution to the fields of Russian literature and cultural studies that should also be of interest to political scientists and historians.

Editorial Reviews

Fedorova] shows how the travelogue model functions in fiction writings and what it adds to the image of America in Soviet literature of that time. This principle allows the author to have a fresh look at the literary process of the 1920s–1930s by integrating texts that are different in terms of genre and narrative style.

Modern Language Review

"This thought-provoking book profits from the author's intimate knowledge of Russian and American culture, her analytical prowess, and her dry sense of humor. Dr. Fedorova's study is a genuinely new contribution to the fields of Russian literature and cultural studies that should also be of interest to political scientists and historians."—Peter Rollberg, The George Washington University

"[Fedorova] shows how the travelogue model functions in fiction writings and what it adds to the image of America in Soviet literature of that time. This principle allows the author to have a fresh look at the literary process of the 1920s–1930s by integrating texts that are different in terms of genre and narrative style."—Modern Language Review

From the Publisher