“They Drink Tea": Everyday Loneliness and the Poetics of Place in Russophone American Short Stories (The Cases of Nina Berberova and Olga Zilberbourg)

This thesis examines the short fiction of Russian-born writers Nina Berberova (1901-1993) and Olga Zilberbourg (1979-) to explore how female émigré and immigrant authors articulate displacement through the motifs of loneliness, memory, and space. Though separated by time and geography, both writers reimagine the short story as a vessel for negotiating fractured identities and the emotional topography of migration. Drawing on literary anthropology, semiotic theory, and reader-response criticism, I argue that the short story’s formal properties—brevity, ambiguity, and fragmentation – mirror the epistemic structures of exile. Berberova’s final American stories distill the Russian literary tradition into sparse, elegiac forms, while Zilberbourg reconfigures émigré poetics for a 21st-century context, navigating linguistic hybridity and cultural in-betweenness. In their narratives, both authors resist assimilationist tropes and articulate survival as a creative, recursive act of authorship. Ultimately, their work reveals how literature written from dislocation does not seek to resolve the problems of exile, but to dwell in exilic complexity – and to speak from within it.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Oregon

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Turygina, Lina

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Presto, Jenifer

• Adaptation
• Diaspora
• Immigrant literature
• In-betweenness
• Women's writing

Statement dc:rights

• All Rights Reserved.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/31522

OAI record oai:identifier

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Ascholarsbank.uoregon.edu%3A1794%2F31522