Sumario: | In Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, one of the protagonists feigns suicide and goes to America. In Fedor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Svidrigailov announces: "I'm going to America," then commits suicide. When in America - "on the other shore," as Russians sometimes put it - Russian emigre characters and writers often feel that, although they have now acquired a new life, this life approximates a posthumous experience. Although the country across the ocean had already begun to acquire concrete historical features in the Russian mind by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, connotations of the Other World, the land on the other side of earthly existence, continue to lurk in the background of literary texts about the New World.
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