Presenting the Strays of Moscow: and Other Stories

PRESENTING THE STRAYS OF MOSCOW: AND OTHER STORIES

Diana Pho

In the fall of 2005, I lived in Moscow and attended the Russian State Humanities University. During this time abroad, I kept a journal of my thoughts and experiences as my fellow students and I explored this new culture. I was curious about how Russians handled the experience of a capitalist democracy, as well as the increasing impact of Western culture fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As I led the life of an outsider looking in, I realized quite unexpectedly that my peers and I became as much changed by Russia as the country itself was changing.

Cultural changes affect people in different ways. Thus, I thought this experience was too immense and too faceted to be told by one narrator. In accordance to that, I decided to write The Strays of Moscow: and Other Stories as a set of linked stories about foreigners in the city. Linked stories provide readers with a variety of windows from which they can observe different impressions about a culture. I wanted to portray the variety of individual responses to Russian culture, but also show the common feelings shared by these travelers, which is why overlapping characters and places are important.

Linked stories, also known as short story cycles, have a long tradition in English and American literature. Classic examples of linked stories that involve a common place and linked characters are James Joyce’s Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. Contemporary examples include Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Edward P. Jones’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children, and Junot Diaz’s Drown. In The Strays of Moscow: and Other Stories, I used the city and its inhabitants (both permanent and temporary) to comment on a variety of issues: Russian-American relations, Westernization, love, culture, race, and identity.

In addition to my own personal experiences, I drew my inspiration from other sources. Firstly, I interviewed my fellow students and recent travelers to Russia. The New York Times and The Moscow Times kept me informed about current events. For an academic perspective on contemporary Russian culture, I read selections from Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex and Society since Gorbachev, edited by Adele Marie Barker.

In writing these stories, I was inspired by the technical achievements of a wide range of short story writers: Anton Chekhov, Peter Taylor, Alice Munro, Tim O’Brien, and Melanie Rae Thon as well as the essays of James Baldwin. I also read works by contemporary Russian authors and American writers interested in Russia, including Katherine Shonk, Lara Vapnyar, Tom Bissell, Victor Pelevin, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and Gary Shteyngart, as well as the collection Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier, edited by Boris Fishman.

What I hoped to accomplish with this project was a work that spoke about the human connection between different cultures – East and West, Russian and American.