http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/19/andrew-miller-books-about-russia?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theguardian%2Fbooks%2Frss+%28Books%29
The country's appeal to Olga Grushin, Gary Shteyngart and David Bezmozgis is easy to understand. They were all born in the Soviet Union, emigrating to North America as children. They inherited a folk memory of suffering, plus the minutely descriptive Russian language. The dying Soviet Union, in which shortages could sometimes be overcome by ruses and yarns, was a natural breeding ground for fabulists. Finally, a system that had seemed adamantine crumbled; the world broke open (Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov wonderfully captures the disorientation caused by this rupture). Add the galvanising effects of immigration to that legacy and you have a propitious background for novelists.
Writers born elsewhere tend to be captivated first by the grandeur and reckless honesty of the great Russian authors; some might always view the country though the prism of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Vasily Grossman. But modern novelists are also drawn in by the same historical electricity and convulsions that fed those giants' work. Think of James Meek's magnificent civil-war saga The People's Act of Love, which features castrates, cannibalism and stranded foreign armies: all-too-real elements of the Russian 20th century, with its camps, famines and mass murder, the whole doomed, rotten Soviet experiment.
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