Lina Turygina holds an MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from the University of Oregon. She is currently a PhD student at Harvard University, where she explores émigré writing, exile, and the stories we tell to survive.
Returning to campus after spring break, Sonya, the protagonist of Olga Zilberbourg’s 2019 short story “Graduate School,” begins sorting through the emails that have piled up in her inbox. One message reports the sudden death of a faculty member, whose body was found in the Humanities building. Apparently, the professor had come in during the break and succumbed to natural causes. After reflecting on the news, Sonya concludes that she and the deceased professor had nothing in common. And yet, they turn out to physically be “on the same page.”
In this essay, I am also discussing two women who seem to have little in common. But that’s one of the beauties of the humanities: the ability to uncover unexpected affinities. While emphasizing motifs of loneliness and cultural in-betweenness, both Zilberbourg (1979-) and Nina Berberova (1901-1993) employ similar narrative techniques, framing them within arguably the most adaptative of genres: the short story. As Zilberbourg notes in the statement preceding her first English-language collection: “Typically, we think of published stories as ‘finished’—but, as most writers know, a ‘finished’ story is a kind of fiction. In the process of maintaining a dual, bicultural identity, the artist never fully adapts, never fully belongs, never stops becoming.” This constant state of change and adaptation resists the bulky form of the novel and instead finds its shape in the lightweight, adaptable short story.
Berberova’s final piece of fiction, the short story “Black Disease” (1959), examines emigration as a setting of loneliness and isolation—one that implies the gradual loss of one’s mind (for instance, forgetting one’s own alphabet) and the erosion of character, as though falling ill. “Black disease” is also a Russian term for epilepsy—the same illness that famously afflicted Fyodor Dostoevsky and his character, Prince Myshkin. In Berberova’s view of Russian literature, this disease becomes a metaphor for the way superfluous men are written out of a narrative—no longer fitting the stories literature knows how to tell. And a woman who exists beyond that pattern? She isn’t written in to begin with.
Writing nearly a century after Berberova and shaped by already shifted literary traditions, Zilberbourg also addresses the idea of opportunities stripped from female experience. But while Berberova’s male character succumbs to loneliness, Zilberbourg’s heroine transforms loneliness into a tool for creative exploration.
“Like Water,” a stunning piece of prose, is the title story in Zilberbourg’s first collection published in English. The narrator walks down memory lane, tracing her journey from leaving Russia to the present moment: “I was fifteen when my parents brought me, against my will, to the Bronx. Most people are confused by the ‘against my will’ part. They assume everyone wanted out of Russia. But how does one explain one’s home? The only way I know is to tell the stories.” And so, she proceeds to tell different stories, all connected by the theme of water or its absence.
The red thread of the narrative is first provoked by “loneliness on the net,” where physically distant people strive to connect through social media. The heroine posts a memory of seeing the Eugene Onegin opera at a theater back in Leningrad. One of her former classmates replies, “That was the moment I fell in love with you.” Tanya’s (surely a coincidental name) confession sparks a reflection in the narrator’s mind. This moment, once forgotten in the routine of her busy life, resurfaces as a second loneliness appears: her husband and children are away, and she is alone in a house under the merciless California sun, lacking both water and fresh air.
This solitude launches a quiet exploration of “girl-on-girl love” tinged with a sense of regret over missed opportunities. Even in twenty-first-century literature, the narrator’s imagination pushes at boundaries, but not quite through them. Though she adapts to immigration and the persistent longing for a lost home, the heroine still ends up solidified under the force of habit—the same habit that keeps an elderly Soviet couple from drinking water: they drink tea.
As the story is published in both Russian and English, it adapts to each language and audience in its own way. The Russian version sidesteps certain specifics, for instance avoiding naming the opera directly and leaning on settings familiar to a Russian reader. Meanwhile, the English version does not soften the edges of its sapphic turn. Navigating her position as a bicultural writer, Zilberbourg moves fluidly between languages, omitting details in one version, using grammar creatively in another, and always finding new ways to adapt.
Berberova, by contrast, did not have the option of bilingual writing. Her process of adaptation and rewriting occurred across genres—at least until the moment she left fiction behind for good. Whenever Berberova makes an argument, she sets out to correct what she sees as the errors embedded in the entire history of thought. Thus, she turns to the seventeenth-century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal, who once wrote, “Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.”
This idea inspired Berberova’s 1958 short story “Thinking Reed,” a work of pure autofiction written nearly a decade before the term was coined. The heroine navigates a love triangle, rejection, and betrayal in the aftermath of the Second World War. To her, a person is nothing more than a plant unless they possess a space for thought that she calls no man’s land. By contrast, the male protagonist becomes little more than a houseplant in his wife’s world. But personal heartbreak pales in comparison to the disillusionment with cultural authority, something Berberova’s heroine expresses with biting wit: “I once had a severe disappointment in my youth when I found out that our great poet Tyutchev stole his best line from a Frenchman. Actually, I still haven’t recovered from it.”
Yet Berberova does not just reject; she rewrites. The line in question comes from Tyutchev’s poem “The Singing of the Waves Proceeds” and alludes to the murmur or grumbling of reeds. But if a reed can think, then that murmur becomes rebellion. Berberova subtly reclaims this notion: whereas Tyutchev wonders why humans are always so quick to rebel, she praises this impulse, arguing that rebellion is what makes a reed thinking. And yet, nearly two decades later, she complicates the idea in her poem “Thinking Burdock,” questioning whether a thinking reed can rebel at all.
The burdock becomes the true hero of Berberova’s rewriting, another narrative of displacement. While Tyutchev wonders why the soul fails to attune itself to the song of a presupposed sea, Berberova dismisses the premise as such: there is no soul, no sea, and therefore, no song. A reed is rooted, selective. A burdock is but a weed — undesirable, yet able to grow anywhere. Its displacement is not a tragedy, but a way of life. In Russian, lopukh (burdock) is also an outdated colloquialism for a fool. And this, in essence, is emigration: the resilience of a burdock at the cost of a reed’s sophistication.
In the end, both Berberova and Zilberbourg lack the comforts of a rooted identity, forced into an unstable, often foolish-seeming resilience and adaptation. But in doing so, they carve out a narrative space where survival itself becomes a form of authorship.
