Soviet Emigres to America

In the case of Soviet émigrés to America, interpretation of the new culture cannot fail to be undertaken in terms of the old because of the historical conditions under which Soviet citizens came to America before 1990. The Cold War politics that dominated international relations between the US and USSR fostered an intense competition, defined not only by differences of political outlook but also by a cultural competition.

Interest in America and its culture, however intense, could hardly prepare a late-20th-century Soviet writer-intellectual for encounter with American stereotype and with the facts of America that lie behind massive misperceptions, especially in the context of establishing permanent resettlement in the US. Such are the set of facts that provide the context for Vassily Aksyonov's memoir In Search of Melancholy Baby. Aksyonov describes this collection of vignettes about his life in America as "the story of my emigration, alienation, and gradual acceptance of a new home" (vii). But it is because

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e text is spent formulating a coherent answer to that and related questions. Part of it is embedded in Aksyonov's serious appreciation of Soviet Cold War ideology and intelligence/propaganda work. Aksyonov does not seem to have much encountered American ideologues in his travels around the US, except for those who work in the academy. What is more striking is the contrast between American and socialist society, with the former either nonideological and geopolitically disengaged or impossibly pluralistic. Diversity and choice, so absent from so much of Soviet culture and so suspect among ideological circles of the West, are the very content of Aksyonov's awakening to American experience. The decentered nature of American discourse and culture is a source of continual surprise, especially given Aksyonov's experience in socialist culture, where "cosmopolitanism" is as dark a sin as "Americanism." Aksyonov cites a Soviet literary critic who "scrutinizes . . . Soviet poetry for the tiniest bedbug of pro-American feeling" (214). Those who run the socialist regime construct American stereotypes that they "come to believe," including what they take to be the inevitable weakness of American fragmentation. What Aksyonov discovers is that s
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Approximate Word count = 1317
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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