The essayistic vision: Representations of America in Russian literary essays 1991-2004

This dissertation examines representations of America in three collections of essays by Russian writers from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Russian and Soviet intellectuals have a long-standing tradition of perceiving America as a symbol of political and cultural otherness. As such, America has evolved into a sort of cultural text, the interpretation of which has become an essential part of the intellectuals' attempts to ascertain their cultural identity. Some intellectuals have harnessed the essay form to capture and broadcast this process of interpretation. The essay, with its orientation towards the subject, can be seen as a nexus between an influential cultural text (America) and the author's personal discourses that constitute their identity. By turning to the essay genre, the authors attempt to negotiate their intellectual autonomy and re-invent themselves as individuals in a new cultural context.;Chapter one considers Mikhail Epstein's On the Borders of Cultures: Russian, American, Soviet in the context of his cultural theory. I focus on Epstein's conception of cultural freedom, which the author links to existence on the borders of cultures, and intellectual autonomy, which Epstein weds to the essay genre. In chapter two, I look at Amerikana by Piotr Vail' and Aleksandr Genis. These authors emphasize the discursive, and often contradictory, nature of the self as they engage in a playful analytical interaction with American culture. They use the essay to test and demonstrate their ability to play various discourses against each other. Chapter three looks at the essays by a number of writers in the collections Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States and the online project of literary essays In My Life. These writers employ the essay to reflect the shifts in their identity by staging an encounter between their personal mythologies and America as a mythical cultural text. In the conclusion, I draw on Iurii Lotman's semiotic theory of culture to suggest a reading of the essays by my chosen authors as texts oriented towards ‘autocommunication.’ As such, they reflect the process of reinvention of the self that results from perpetual recoding of external cultural messages by internal(-ized) personal codes.