Fülszöveg
ver the years, American writers such as John Steinbeck have offered their impressions of life in the Soviet Union, but how does the U.S.A. look through the eyes of a Russian?
Here the acclaimed Russian émigré novelist Vas-siiy Aksyonov offers an exuberant chronicle of his encounters with life, liberty and the pursuit of hap-piness as he makes the United States his home.
One of the leading Soviet writers of his genera-tion—and one of the most popular—Aksyonov cap-tured the spirit of Russia's Western-oriented youth in the sixties and their celebration of American culture In 1980, he was forced to emigrate when his master-work, The Burn, was published in the West. Now he compares America in the flesh to the mythical America of the Russian imagination.
Aksyonov has traveled from coast to coast and brings a novelist's eye for the unexpected to real-life experiences as varied as eating lunch in a Texas diner, confronting a traffic cop in the Arizona desert, attending a literary...
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Fülszöveg
ver the years, American writers such as John Steinbeck have offered their impressions of life in the Soviet Union, but how does the U.S.A. look through the eyes of a Russian?
Here the acclaimed Russian émigré novelist Vas-siiy Aksyonov offers an exuberant chronicle of his encounters with life, liberty and the pursuit of hap-piness as he makes the United States his home.
One of the leading Soviet writers of his genera-tion—and one of the most popular—Aksyonov cap-tured the spirit of Russia's Western-oriented youth in the sixties and their celebration of American culture In 1980, he was forced to emigrate when his master-work, The Burn, was published in the West. Now he compares America in the flesh to the mythical America of the Russian imagination.
Aksyonov has traveled from coast to coast and brings a novelist's eye for the unexpected to real-life experiences as varied as eating lunch in a Texas diner, confronting a traffic cop in the Arizona desert, attending a literary weekend near Tanglewood and watching local television, and visiting the immigra-tion office in Washington. Aksyonov's irrepressible imagination and vivid sense of the surreal spill over into fragments of fiction interspersed throughout that he portrays as commercials for a növel to come.
His views are provocative—not even somé Russian apparatchiks, he writes, are as nasty as somé American immigration bureaucrats—and scath-ingly funny about the American literary scene. He follows American politics, offering hilarious com-mentary on presidential campaigns, teaches Russian literature to "the children of suburbia," scorns the bohemian life in New York, becomes an avid Red-skins fan and relishes the European charm and pointed contradictions of life in the nation's capital, where he and his wife finally hang their hats.
Most of all, however, Aksyonov celebrates the endless variety of American life, and through his eyes, even the "notoriously checked trousers and flower-laden hats" of the elderly become signs of
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vibrancy rather than bad taste. As Aksyonov is "sucked into the great big colorful world of American provincialism," we learn a great deal about Russian preconceptions—and a great deal about ourselves.
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About the Author
Vassily Pavlovich Aksyonov was born in Kazan in 1932 and educated as a doctor. He went on to establish himself at the forefront of Soviet cultural life through his prodigious activity as a novelist, short-story writer, dramatist and screenwriter but was forced to emigrate in 1980 when his növel, The Burn, was published in Italy. He now lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Maya, where he has been a Fellow of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and is currently teaching at Goucher College and at The Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Other works published in English include The Steel Bird and Other Stories, The Island of Crimea and The Burn.
Jacket design: John Sposato
Random House, Inc., New York, N.Y. 10022 Printed in U.S. A. 6/87 L> 1087 Random Home. Inc.
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