Leaving Leningrad: The True Adventures of a Soviet Empire (Brandeis Series on Jewish Women) - Hardcover

Shtern, Ludmila

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1584651008 ISBN 13: 9781584651000

Publisher: Brandeis University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Although women writers have held a conspicuous place in the history of modern Russian literature, they have been slow to find their true voices in exile. Ludmila Shtern, a geologist/writer who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975, offers a completely fresh, unsentimental look at daily life in the former Soviet Union and the US in the second half of the 20th century. Her memoir, part comic bildungsroman, part picaresque adventure, shows its heroine, Tatyana Dargis, growing up in the USSR, falling in love, falling afoul of the KGB, and finally emigrating to the US where new absurdities (capitalist rather than communist in nature) prevail. An amalgam of bittersweet understatement and mordant wit, Shtern's prose is shaped by her ear for a wide range of human voices and the stories they tell, and by her eye for the grotesqueries and savagely funny pain of modern life. The late Joseph Brodsky, hailing Shtern as "an accomplished stylist" and "a talented humorist," said, "Ms. Shtern has a sharp eye for the telling details of contemporary Russian life . . . The light touch of her satire and her sustained wit are impressive and a pleasure to read." Whether running the bureaucratic obstacle course required for permission to visit Paris or buying a car she can't afford simply because her number came up on a waiting list; whether coping with the intrigues of neighbors in an overcrowded Leningrad apartment or enduring that quintessentially American experience, a self-actualization workshop, Shtern maintains a cheerful sense of irony (even when most depressed) and offers through her personal transit from one life to the next, a tight, witty social history of the two world powers at the end of the Cold War.

About this title

Review

"An exceptional storyteller, Shtern chooses perfect anecdotes that connect readers to Tatyana's character and growth while providing rich social background and commentary on both Soviet and American life. Best of all, Shtern is hilarious. Her comedy is wry, brash, tinged with neuroticism, and self-deprecating, and it almost always serves to illuminate larger truths her recounted struggle to impress her future husband with romantic extravagances and rare books gives readers an almost cinematic glimpse of 1960s Leningrad. Readers will delight in Shtern's outrageous, intelligent wit in stories that illuminate, through her specific Soviet history, the increasingly common experience of resettling across borders."--Booklist

Synopsis

The author describes her childhood in Leningrad, her arrival in the United States in 1975, and her search for a home and work in the United States, and offers commentary on life under both communism and capitalism.

About this edition

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1584651008
• ISBN 13: 9781584651000
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176