Review by Brook Horowitz Whether in samizdat or tamizdat, exile has been a recurring theme in Russian literature. Ever since Dostoevsky returned from the House of the Dead or Herzen developed his revolutionary thought in Paris or London, banishment to the wastes of Siberia or emigration to the cultural deserts of the West, and the consequent feelings of isolation, marginalisation, and being an outcast are part of what it is to be Russian. To be Russian is defined in terms of the inability to be Russian, by choice, circumstance or Fate. Less well explored is the sense of exile of second-generation Russian émigrés, born outside of Russia. They continue their parents’ wandering, caught between their striving for freedom and their nostalgia for home. Foreigners in their own land, strangers in their adopted country, they live the memories of another generation for a country they have never known. Nestor Strannikov, the young hero of Nikolai Dejevsky’s sensitive coming-of-age novel, A Myth of Messina, is just such a second-generation émigré. Like the author himself, born of Russian parents in a UN refugee camp in Germany at the end of the Second World War, raised in small-town America, Strannikov is the ultimate wanderer, as his surname suggests (in Russian the name Strannikov means “wanderer”). We meet him in his senior year at high school in the fictional town of Messina, Maine, in the late 1960s, the outsider, the odd-ball, on one hand an increasingly detached observer of American and Russian mœurs, on the other hand, a sensitive teenager confronting a bewildering array of decisions, from how to handle his parents’ divorce to discovering and identifying his own path in life. His home is totally Russian, with the icon in the corner, and newspapers strewn around the living room. The household is a “time capsule” ruled with a manic despotism by his mother, an aktivistka of the local Russian Cultural Society, rabid anticommunist, preserver of the national heritage against the onslaught of American mass culture (Nestor discovers that she has “censored” the Russian and American magazines lying about the house by sticking together any pages which show pictures either of the Communist elite in Moscow or of Mickey Mouse, both equally dangerous threats to the intellect). His father, an engineer, a more balanced figure, has preserved his Russian heritage, but wants to join the melting pot: “a man should feel the need to test himself, and the standard measure must be the norm prevailing round about. For us this means diving into the American mainstream.” With such ideas being anathema to the mother, their divorce is inevitable. The separation and his mother’s marriage to Svinin, the fat, sweaty secretary of the Russian society, rips Nestor’s life asunder.
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