Petropolis:The Immigration Writing In A Multicultural Context

As part of a new generation of Russian-American writers in the 21 st century,Anya Ulinich’s debut novel,Petropolis,has attracted wide attention in the contemporary American literary world by its unique immigration narrative and multicultural writing.This novel takes the distinctive social group,Soviet Jews,as the writing background,and focuses on the immigrant experience of the father and daughter in an intellectual family.Anya’s multiracial identity not only provides her with a broader horizon on literary creation,but also inspires her to think over her cultural roots constantly.Confronted with multicultural context,Anya’s immigration writing not only expresses worries about the plight of immigrants,identity confusion and cultural crisis,but also indicates her great concerns over humanity values,spiritual homeland and identity reconstruction.It is an undeniable fact that Anya’s immigration writing successfully arouses people’s attention to immigrants as a cultural group.More importantly,it makes people re-examine the complex attribution and core values behind the phenomenon of immigration.The thesis is comprised of five chapters.Chapter One initiates a brief introduction of Anya Ulinich and her masterpiece Petropolis,summarizes the existing scholarly research on Anya and her writings.Chapter Two focuses on the traumatic experience of Soviet Jews,using trauma theory to analyze the symptoms and causes of trauma and trauma healing,to explore their motivation for immigration by discussing individual and collective trauma.Chapter Three explicates the impact of their Jewish and Russophone identity on their feelings of being rootless vagrants,using diaspora theory to analyze the double diaspora of Soviet Jews in both Soviet and American contexts.Chapter Four focuses on Soviet Jews’ attitudes to cultural assimilation in America in the process of acculturation,analyzes different results caused by different attitudes,and investigates their routes of identity reconstruction.Chapter Five comes to the conclusion.The immigration culture behind the Soviet Jews has its deep social and historical origins.Anya’s immigration writing reveals the Soviet Jews’ psychological life style,enlightens immigrants to deal with their living predicaments in a multicultural context.