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Apr. 2nd, 2025 07:50 pmA year or two ago I stumbled over a copy of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States in a used bookstore and brought it home with me with intent to read at some future time. Last month I ended up having to sit still in our living room out of reach of my phone/current book/etc for cat-related reasons and so pulled the nearest thing off the nearest shelf: the time had apparently come.
And what a weird time it was, is, to be reading this book. The book was published in 2004, the essays commissioned for the project. The essays themselves vary from interesting to funny to overwrought to banal to offensive -- and one can't really be offended even so; it is, of course, always fascinating to see oneself as others see one -- but all of them were written in the early 2000s, in the immediate years following 9/11, and so there is a kind of thread of envy and pity and a little fear running as an undercurrent throughout the whole book: you Americans, you stupid Americans, you thought you were exempt from terrible things happening to you, and what are you going to do now you've realized that they can?
And what a weird time it was, is, to be reading this book. The book was published in 2004, the essays commissioned for the project. The essays themselves vary from interesting to funny to overwrought to banal to offensive -- and one can't really be offended even so; it is, of course, always fascinating to see oneself as others see one -- but all of them were written in the early 2000s, in the immediate years following 9/11, and so there is a kind of thread of envy and pity and a little fear running as an undercurrent throughout the whole book: you Americans, you stupid Americans, you thought you were exempt from terrible things happening to you, and what are you going to do now you've realized that they can?
