To do or to have done to you

Russia and the United States have each had revolutions. Both appear to have weathered some of the most rigorous changes in the course of modern history. But there is something in these revolutions that conjures the literal meaning of the word: to return to an original essence after a complete cycle.

Early Americans were pioneers seeking individual liberty; that is what their revolution officially restored to them. Early Russians were serfs toiling under the yoke of tyranny; that is what their revolution officially restored to them. This distinction between quondam American and Russian destinies is captured in several contrasts: the individual vs. the masses, independence vs. dependence, advocacy vs. abiding. Metaphorically, it is as simple as the difference between “to do” and “to have done to you.”

This is also the latent, almost genetic distinction between these two debut short fiction collections about Russia. In “The Red Passport” by Katherine Shonk, an American, people make choices and decisions, they struggle through situations that are presented to them and try to change their conditions. Lara Vapnyar, a Russian, infuses “There Are Jews in My House” with atmosphere, or nastroenie, a sort of tuning of characters to their surroundings. Her people bleed into seamless obedience to their situations, reflecting an almost unconquerable Russian ailment -- what Russian literature scholar Richard Peace once described as “supine fatalism.” Shonk’s people do things; Vapnyar’s people have things done to them.

Shonk keeps her stories in real time; her characters are particular individuals changed by their particular impulses. All are about Americans and Russians in Russia: American Russophiles, Americanized Russians, Russians who attach themselves to Americans because they want to go to America, Americans who want Russian friends and Russians returning from America. This collection will remind every American who has spent time in Russia of all the kooky, charming details and idiosyncrasies of Russian life. And though sometimes the author seems suspiciously reliant on the American element in her stories, she is disarmingly deft at getting into the heads of her Russian characters.

Vapnyar came from Russia to the United States nine years ago, and her collection, written in English, is a feat of linguistic achievement. Not only is her prose stark and carved in its fresh foreignness but her stories have the quality of memoir, which lends a naturalness to her subjects but also a certain distance from their plights. Vapnyar’s characters are Russian in the smallest actions -- in the way they eat lunch, in the way they carry their bags -- unlike Shonk’s, whom she approaches armed with a keenness for cultural difference and the observant curiosity of a birdwatcher.

Four of the six stories in Vapnyar’s collection are told from the point of view of a child, the most faithful yet unwitting of literary observers. Children also rarely create their own fates; they roll with the punches in situations over which they have no control. In “Ovrashki’s Trains,” Vapnyar’s narrator remembers being 5 and spending summers at a dacha in the village of Ovrashki. Most of the story describes the quietly lovely inner sanctum of a little girl’s love for her father, whom she hopes each day will arrive on the Moscow train. When she is told her father died four years earlier, she retreats from the adult world that betrayed her.

Shonk’s collection contains a story told from a very different child’s point of view. In “The Wooden Village of Kizhi,” the protagonist is the inquisitive Tanya, a Russian-born girl who is growing up in America but returns to Russia with her mail-order-bride mother to visit relatives. During the visit, Tanya cunningly unearths the truth, clue by clue, about the identity and death of her real father as she navigates her family myths in a strangely familiar Russia. Neither author’s approach to the fatherless child is more convincing than the other -- these are both stories of very thoughtful kids -- but the opposing Weltanschauungen of the authors (and hence their characters) is clear. Vapnyar’s protagonist is told about her father by others. Shonk’s Tanya seeks answers for herself.

These children, condemned to the periphery of a confusing adult world, take their place among a multitude of outsiders in these collections. Vapnyar’s outsiders are Russian Jews, Russian immigrants, transplanted workers, lonely hearts and bewildered children. Her stories portray the predicament of outsiders in their Russian context, alienated by a world to which they belong. Vapnyar captures the torture of longing to bond with others while a disabling external force pushes them away, as in the collection’s title story, “There Are Jews in My House.” In this, the most serious of Vapnyar’s stories, Galina takes in best friend Raya, a Jew, when German soldiers arrive in their Russian town. Over the course of the occupation, the household tenses to unbearable catalepsy, and Galina starts daring herself to betray her friend, practicing the haunting line of the title: “Es gibt Juden in mein Haus.” She is shocked to her senses when Raya leaves unexpectedly in the night. Vapnyar treats Galina’s betrayal without condemning -- pointing a finger not at Galina’s semi-delirious, cruel fantasies but at an external force, the Nazis who have invaded their town, their apartment and their friendship.

Shonk approaches “otherness” more literally, often juxtaposing Russians and Americans, exploring the envy, loneliness, questioning and solutions that draw them to each other. So too do her stories focused more singularly on Russian characters. In a tale of Chernobyl evacuees, a daughter crosses a quarantine border into the contaminated villages on weekly visits to her aged mother, who refuses to leave their home because of a poison she cannot see. As the daughter shies from her mother’s radioactive embrace, Shonk exposes a dual dissociation: a daughter estranged from her hometown and a mother amputated from the external world.

On some level, what differentiates these collections, American-ness and Russian-ness, is what unites them: otherness. Human life exists between the poles of individuality and community, and when you are forced to either extreme, the effect is the same: You feel extrinsic, an outsider bound by internal urges and external pressures to extricate and to bond. In the United States, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, we like to form associations. The Russian arena is more chaotic and there, perhaps more than anywhere, the struggle along the axis between these impossible poles rages -- a struggle captured masterfully by Shonk and Vapnyar. Whether you are American or Russian, transitive or intransitive, you must read these stories or have them read to you.