Salon

Emigre magazines played an important role in keeping Russian culture alive in exile. Indeed, it could not have survived otherwise. For a while after the Revolution, the situation didn't seem that bad; Alexei "The Red Count" Tolstoy could be in favor with Stalin despite living abroad. But the two worlds were soon totally separated, as one can see in the troubled diaries of Marina Tsvetayeva's son Georgy Yefron, who came to Russia with his mother in 1939 as a teenage boy and was killed fighting the Nazis in 1944. In his diaries, Yefron tries to bridge the enormous gap between his French upbringing and Soviet reality.

Such alienation is no less palpable in Vladimir Nabokov's novel "The Gift," where the main character, an exile in Berlin, no doubt echoing the author's own sentiments, cannot cope with the flatness and boredom of Soviet magazines, including their chess problems. But the emigre literary life described in the novel is not very joyful either: There are numerous little cliques and petty ambitions that cover a deep and tragic sense of being uprooted.

Now, of course, the situation is different, with emigre writers such as Vasily Aksyonov receiving Russia's most prestigious literary prizes and chairing their juries. Russian-language publications are issued in more than 80 countries, and books, magazines or newspapers from Russia are widely available abroad. Some publications, such as the popular newspaper Argumenty i Fakty, even fine-tune their European versions for local readers.

Many of the Russian-language newspapers based in the West, however, cannot boast of any journalistic standards. They swarm with stylistic and grammatical mistakes, recycle news from the Russian or local press and fill their pages with ads. In this landscape, the publications that uphold high literary standards are few and far between. These include the Paris-based Kontinent, founded by writer Vladimir Maksimov, and the New York-based Novy Zhurnal (New Magazine), which is actually quite old, being the successor of Sovremenniye Zapiski (Modern Notes), the best Russian literary journal of the 1920s and 1930s, which published the works of such authors as Nabokov and Nobel Prize-winner Ivan Bunin.

In today's cosmopolitan world, the actual place of the author's residence is not important. Moreover, it is often quite difficult to define. Former divisions do not apply any more, and communication between real pros -- who are few enough on either side of the border -- is what should define today's Russian literary landscape.