Synopses & Reviews
Co-authored by Russian, Ukrainian, and American critics,
Dialogues/Dialogi is the first fully collaborative and comparative study of American and (ex)Soviet women writers. Truly a dialogue, the book juxtaposes fiction by American and Soviet women from the 1960s to the present to reveal their similarities and differences and to show how questions of gender, race, and ethnicity are enacted in the societies and psyches each text represents. Begun in the early days of
glasnost and completed in 1992, the book conveys the spirit and excitement of an unprecedented critical conversation conducted during a time of historic transformation.
Dialogues/Dialogi pairs stories by Tillie Olsen, Toni Cade Bambara, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Leslie Marmon Silko (reprinted here in full) with Russian stories by I. Grekova, Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Elena Makarova, and Anna Nerkagi, many of them appearing here for the first time in English. Exquisite in their stylistic and thematic variety, suggestive of the range of women's experience and fiction in both countries, each story is the subject of paired interpretive essays by an American and an (ex)Soviet critic from among the book's authors.
A colloquy of diverse voices speaking together in multiple, mutually illuminating exchanges, Dialogues/Dialogi testifies to the possibility of evolving relationships among women across borders once considered impassable.
Review
"Culture has always been aware of borders; but the reader of this comparative source-book and study of women writers American and ex-Soviet will experience the transcending of borders. As cross-disciplinary studies gain ground in our universities, this may well become a landmark book."—Barbara Heldt, University of British Columbia
Review
"[This] book is pioneering. It is original and intellectually enterprising."—Catharine R. Stimpson, Rutgers University
About the Author
Susan Hardy Aiken is Professor of English at the University of Arizona.
Adele Barker is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Maya Koreneva is a scholar at the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow.
Ekaterina Stetsenko is a scholar at the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xiii
Notes on Transliteration and Editing xix
Beginnings 1
1
1. Ladies Hairdresser / Grekova 43
Tell me a Riddle / Tillie Olsen 88
Stages of Dissent: Olsen, Grekova, and the Politics of Creativity / Susan Hardy Aiken 120
Revolutions from Within / Ekaterina Stetsenko 141
Dialogue 158
2
Witchbird / Toni Cade Bambara 163
That Kind of Girl / Liudmila Petrushevskaia 178
Children of the Sixties / Maya Koreneva 191
Telling the Other('s) Story, or, the Blues in Two languages / Susan Hardy Aiken 206
Dialogue 224
3
Home / Jayne Anne Phillips 229
Needlefish / Elena Makarova 242
The World of Our Mothers / Adele Marie Barker 253
Hopes and Nightmares of the Young / Maya Koreneva 266
Dialogue 279
4
Aniko of the Nogo Tribe / Anna Nerkagi 285
Storyteller / Leslie Marmon SIlko 312
Retelling the Legends / Ekaterino Stetsenko 327
Crossings / Adele Marie Barker 340
Dialogue 354
Afterword: Histories and Fictions 357
Selected Bibliography 393
Index 409