It is both tempting and dangerous for expatriates to hold forth on the details and meaning of the country they flee to, because it is difficult to avoid interpreting and explaining the new country in terms of the old one, and difficult to avoid comparison and contrast as the major mode of experience. The nonnative brings to the new land both inaccurate expectations and a lack of investment in native myths, with the result that the myths themselves may be demystified.
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 of his identity as a Soviet citizen, an identity that he was both obliged and willing to reject when he was forced into exile, that it is also a story of demythification and remythification of his new home. For as Aksyonov encounters the trivialities and solemnities of American experience, he revisits the Soviet provenance of his misconceptions and reconfigure his analysis of them.
In the process of coming to a new consciousness about the American experien...