From Intercultural Communication to Transcultural Creativity: A Study of Russian-American Fiction

Abstract

The world has been growing more globalised, people have been moving and absorbing different cultural peculiarities. Now intercultural perspective might seem insufficient to describe the extent to which local cultures and identities are linked globally. As a result, language contact and communication between and across cultures have been changing. The present paper aims at studying modern RussianAmerican fiction from intercultural and transcultural perspectives emphasizing the translingual features and transcultural changes. The paper discusses the phenomenon of creative translingualism, which means writing in one or two languages that are not the native tongues. Contemporary American literature may be proud of its modern writers of Russian and Soviet descent: Olga Grushin, Sana Krasikov, Lara Vapnyar, Anya Ulinich, Irina Reyn. All the authors changed their country of birth and moved to the USA and as a result, they chose English as the language of their creative writings. However, the English of their works reflects the Russian language, culture, and identity of the writers making the English text not truly English. The research primarily studies the linguistic tools (borrowing, code mixing, code-switching and broken English) used by the writers to render Russian culture by means of the English language as well as the transcultural shift that has been inevitable and has become an inalienable part of new cultural identities.