Transnational Identities in Diaspora Writing : The Narratives of Vasily Yanovsky

The study of Russian émigré writing has been a vibrant academic fi eld for almost three decades, yet the dominant critical reception of these texts remains today suff used with the glasnost-era rhetoric of a “grand return”: the diaspora is described in terms of a “branch” or “tributary” destined to merge with twentieth-century Russian literature of the homeland.1 Émigré writers are routinely contextualized within the Russian literary canon in conventional terms, on the basis of country of origin and language. This hierarchical and centripetal vision of the relationship between metropolitan Russia and the diaspora presumes a preeminent relevance for exiles of the native tradition and the national master narrative, when in fact they had for many years evolved in a completely diff erent geographical and cultural space. Migrants’ narratives generally constitute a discursive fi eld in which narrowly conceived national, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural affi liations are constantly deterritorialized and renegotiated. When applied to the younger generation of the fi rst wave, and in particular the authors who emerged from the Russian Montparnasse circle of interwar Paris, a strictly mononational disciplinary approach would appear reductive. Informed by diverse cultural infl uences, their narratives systematically transcend the nationalist framework, engendering a transnational agenda and poetics. In this article, I set Russian émigré literature in dialogue with transnational theory—a productive conceptual context for the discussion of narratives marked by displacement, transcultural alienation, and hybridity. The evolving transnational theory proposes an alternative approach to articulating group identities in today’s globalized, postnational, postcolonial, and postmodernist world, in which the nation is no longer seen as a stable and monolithic category but rather an “imagined community” and even a “cultural artefact.”2 However, it also provides a viable interpretive lens for assessing diverse cultural phenomena from other time periods, and in particular modernist writing born out of the experience of exile.3 One of the central categories in the lexicon of transnationalism is the boundary, and insights into its