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

By Ludmila Shtern

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584651008
• ISBN13: 9781584651000
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.5" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Entertaining Vignettes of Soviet and American Life

I enjoyed this book greatly. Not so much an autobiography as a series of vignettes, Leaving Leningrad is very easy and entertaining reading. The witty personality of the author shines through every page so that by the end of the book you feel you know her well. You also feel you have seen what it must have been like to live in the Soviet Union in the 60's and 70's - not from the commonly available perspective of an academic or a dissident, but from the point of view of the ordinary everyday working stiff. That's what makes the book not only light and fun, but also enlightening. Read it in an evening (that's all it takes) and I'm sure you'll be glad you did. I was.