Out of the USSR

This book examines how women authors recall their own and their families’ past lives after having emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and how they reflect on their new country of residence, be it Germany, Austria, Israel, USA, or Finland, among others. The chapters connect migration, memory, and gender studies to analyse literary presentations created by these "travelling" women.

The aim of the book is to pay attention both to women’s contribution to cultural transfer, and to the mobility of memories: for the first time, it brings women’s narratives as a form and tool to work through both individual and collective traumas to the forefront, remedying a long-standing omission in Russian and post-Soviet migration history. At the same time, the volume looks at "travelling" memories and cultural traumas from a gendered perspective: what happens when the recollections of women’s traumatic experiences of Soviet history travel through time and space?

As this volume argues, narratives by women who left the Soviet Union often call into question official accounts of Soviet history, and rewrite them in a way that makes room for gendered lived experience.