Interest in America and its Culture

For as Aksyonov encounters the trivialities and solemnities of the Statesn experience, he revisits the Soviet provenance of his misconceptions and reconfigure his analysis of them.

In the process of plan of attack to a new consciousness about the American experience, Aksyonov accomplishes a critique of Soviet finishing and--even more important--the Western European intellectual filter done which so much Soviet perception of America passes. Aksyonov's point of departure is the multiple ship canal in which Western European intellectuals make a hurtle of hating America. For his part, Aksyonov well remembers the mythic images that Soviet intellectuals and dissidents constructed of American popular culture during the Cold War. His intention to correct the fallacies of such a shed becomes clear early on. That is in the background of the opening snap of the book, which has Aksyonov in conversation with a West German who has in condition(p) of Aksyonov's plan to emigrate to America and who discourages such a playact because he despises the US with the absolute assurance that only someone who has never been there could subscribe to. "What has he got against America, that bigwig German?" Aksyonov asks (4). And he proceeds to state a principal line of suasion in the book:

I keep wondering what provokes so many

Aksyonov, Vassily. In come along of Melancholy Baby. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: Random House, 1987.

Much of the break of the text is spent formulating a coherent answer to that and cogitate questions. Part of it is embedded in Aksyonov's serious appreciation of Soviet Cold War ideology and intelligence/propaganda work. Aksyonov does not seem to have much encountered American ideologues in his travels around the US, extract for those who work in the academy. What is more striking is the contrast mingled with American and collective society, with the former either nonideological and geopolitically disengaged or impossibly pluralistic.

people in Latin America, Russia, and Europe to anti-American fantasy of such intensity that I can only be called hatred.

There is something oddly hysterical about it all, as if America were not a country but a muliebrity who has hurt a man's pride by cheating on him (7).

Aksyonov is far from absorbing American experience uncritically. In life-sized part, he anchors his critique of what he takes to be political na?vete and American self-confidence in a series of scam chapters that are all titled "Sketches for a Novel to Be." In these brief, comic-ironic instalments, Aksyonov creates a fictional proxy for himself (Lyova) and surrounds Lyova with a variety of lad ?migr?s who, like himself, blunder and cope their way through the accidentals of American experience based on what might have helped them cope with the vagaries of socialist society. In one such episode clever Lyova finds a job as a hall porter at a yuppie restaurant and concocts a romantic foregone for himself to impress everybody, as they might be impressed at home--only to find that no one is particularly impressed, either because they escape the historical knowledge necessary to appreciate the story or because the "regulars were themselves never quite what they clamed to be" (99).

It is the rigid uniformity of socialist society and ideology that Aksyonov takes
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