A Plurilingual Analysis of Four Russian-American Autobiographies

Among the many examples of Russian-American émigré literature, a number of less known authors moved to the USA, following their predecessors' transnational and plurilingual experiences. The bilingual (and sometimes trilingual) expressions in their works written in English invite a contrastive analysis of their transition from their source language, Russian, to their target language, English. This book explores the linguistic structure of the autobiographies of four Russian-American writers (Cournos, Nabokov, Berberova and Shteyngart) bringing into focus the linguistic 'geology' of their texts, as they record their passage from a Russian world to an English one. These linguistic passages are examined from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, by dwelling on the geographies of the émigrés' itineraries as well as on the process of linguistic transformation that such itineraries generated. By analyzing these writers' geographic and linguistic routes, this volume engages the reader in a metalinguistic discourse and highlights the influence of these first plurilingual experiments on modern theories concerning linguistic globalization.

Michele Russo holds a Ph.D in English and Anglo-American Studies from the 'G. d'Annunzio' University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, and teaches English at the Department of Economics, University of Foggia, Italy. He was Assistant and Visiting Professor of Italian language and literature at the Nazareth College of Rochester, New York, USA. His main research topics include early Anglo-American literature, translation and self-translation in the literature of emigration, Victorian literature and 19th century British and American women writers.