ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys Anglophone American literature written by Russian-speaking immigrants over the past hundred years. It discusses three translingual “superstars”—Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and Joseph Brodsky—as well as a few lesser-known twentieth-century Russian-born writers, before moving on to the current wave of twenty-first-century Russian-American immigrant novelists and poets. Most of these authors came to the U.S. as part of the Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union and its successor states. The chapter explores how these writers engage their multiple identities and how their native tongue, Russian, affects their writings in their adopted language.
