catalogue:

“Letters of a Russian Traveller” is an NLO book series that encompasses short novels, travel accounts and sketches and vignettes written to preserve memories of a journey. All of these texts were written by travelling authors who were born in the Soviet Union. Some of them have since emigrated; others now reside in the newly independent states that emerged after the collapse of the USSR, yet on the symbolic level all of them still belong to the same (post-)Soviet space and share the same experience. This experience could not but encouraged – or in most cases, enforced, considering the social and historical context of the country’s political transformation – dramatic identity reconfigurations. Against the backdrop of such experience any journey turns first and furthermost into an exploration of one’s own identity and an exercise in auto-reflexivity. Through encounters with foreign cultures, traditions and realities – be it through unfamiliar sounds of music or exotic tastes and textures of foreign cuisines, – the travelling author seeks to discern his or her own reflection in the Other and to carefully piece together something that is conceived of as one’s own identity.

Series editor — Denis Larionov