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4.10 - The Émigré

from History 4 - Heroes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Literature about Russians abroad includes memoirs and other non-fiction narratives of exile and emigration, often by writers who wrote from first-hand experience. It also includes fiction by writers who may or may not have emigrated themselves. Emigration is at once a biographical fact and a literary phenomenon; this has led to conflicting approaches to its interpretation. This chapter centres on the protagonists found in works of émigré literature – universalising archetypal figures, minimally disguised authorial alter egos, and migrants who elicit an unexpected jolt of recognition – all created in their historical moment, yet open to new meanings beyond their time and émigré milieu. It concludes with an examination of the exodus of writers from Russia that began soon after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the concomitant need to re-evaluate the association between literary emigration and the émigré writer as a voice of moral authority.

Keywords

exileemigrationmigrationliterary diaspora
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 842 - 858
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty, Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the First Emigration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Caffee, Naomi Beth, ‘Russophonia: Towards a transnational conception of Russian-language literature’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles (2013).Google Scholar
Glad, John, Conversations in Exile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Matich, Olga, with Heim, Michael, The Third Wave: Russian Literature in Emigration (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1984).Google Scholar
Platt, Kevin (ed.), Global Russian Cultures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020).Google Scholar
Raeff, Marc, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Rubins, Maria (ed.), Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920–2020 (London: UCL Press, 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, Greta, Russians Abroad: Literary and Cultural Politics of Diaspora (1919–1939), ed. Clark, Katerina, Condee, Nancy, Slobin, Dan, and Slobin, Mark (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wanner, Adrian, Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).Google Scholar

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