Interpretation of Travels: Russia and America in Travelogues and Intertexts

The cultural dialogue between Russia and America has been ongoing for centuries, despite all historical obstacles. Writers and philosophers from both countries have closely followed each other's political, social, and artistic experiments. The real and imagined travels across the ocean they undertook helped them to reflect on each other's experiences and better understand themselves. These contacts and fantasies gave rise to unusual convergences of ideas and plots. Re-reading well-known texts from Russian and American literary traditions through the lens of the relationship between the two cultures, Alexander Etkind offers new interpretations. How did Pushkin read Tocqueville's famous treatise, how did the American ambassador enter Bulgakov's novel, and how did a girl from Leningrad influence financial leaders in America? Why do the plots of Nabokov and Pasternak intertwine, and what story is told in the letters of Zinaida Trotzkaya? Etkind seeks answers to these questions using a method he characterizes as "new historicism". For this edition, some chapters have been revised and supplemented by the author. Alexander Etkind is a cultural historian and literary scholar, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence and the Central European University in Vienna. He is the author of the books published by NLO, "Internal Colonization: The Imperial Experience of Russia"; "Crooked Grief: Memory of the Unburied"; "The Nature of Evil: Raw Materials and the State".