Literature Professor Pens Debut Novel ‘Ninochka’

Svetlana Boym doesn’t give much credence to the adage “write what you know.” Ninochka, her recently released debut novel, focuses not on the vast knowledge she has gained over the years, but rather on questions of choice and regret that she has no intention of answering.

“You never know at which crossroads you made rights decisions and wrong decisions,” Boym says. “Life takes control of itself.”

A collection of items culled from the Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature’s own autobiography, Ninochka was a project years in the making. Boym’s unique experience with history imbues the novel, turning it from an avant-garde murder mystery into an insightful commentary on the plight of those hindered by life from achieving what they think they want.

The book explores the immigrant experience in America by winding its way through the lives of two Russian women separated by an ocean and 60 years of history. Tanya, a recent arrival to New York City in the 1990s, finds herself lost while piecing together the unsolved murder of one Nina B. who was murdered in Paris on the eve of World War II.

Full of unfettered curiosity, Tanya travels to Paris and takes hold of Nina’s personal archive. Filtering bits and pieces of information through time and space, Tanya discovers the diaries, love letters and snippets of political propaganda are full of false leads and dead ends.

Mimicking the struggles of everyday life, Boym takes the reader down each thread of plot and recreates the grueling process of discovering history. “It’s a way of exploring the roads one cannot take in real life, but that continue to haunt us,” she says.

As the real story of Nina’s murder materializes, Tanya finds herself intertwined in an immigrant underworld, where displaced people lead double lives. In a changing post-Cold War world, conspiracy theories have taken control of many immigrants’ interpretation of reality. Likewise, Tanya struggles to interpret her own family history.

Boym says this struggle for personal identity mirrors her own quest for self in the United States. Born in the Soviet Union at the height of Cold War tensions, Boym fled as a teenager. She says her personal biography demands from her a certain amount of exploration. She identifies herself as a refugee stuck somewhere between her history in Russia and her new life in America.

Though she finds herself more and more estranged from her Russian roots, Boym says that she still does not feel wholly at home in America. She says that she finds herself leading the same kind of double life, as her characters do.

Balancing her questions and curiosity, Boym says that the immigrant experience teaches double consciousness. “You exist in two different worlds and self translation is always hard,” she says. “You’re always estranged from both cultures.”

On the theme of remembrance and reflection, the author and critics alike have linked Ninochka to Boym’s recent book The Future of Nostalgia. In both works, Boym is critical of the common tropes of nostalgia. She is troubled by the idea that immigrants are supposed to be nostalgic and draws a distinction between two different types of nostalgia: restorative and reflective.

Boym explains the difference using the image of Russian nesting dolls on immigrants’ fireplace mantles. In a regressive way, she says, those who suffer from restorative nostalgia separate themselves from both worlds in an attempt to recreate home. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, serves as a hopeless vehicle to return to a lost experience. Realizing that she can never truly return to the Russia of her childhood, Boym struggles most with this type.

“In a way, I don’t know what the object of nostalgia is,” Boym says. “Is it of a lost Russia or is it just of my forgotten friends?”

In this way, Boym claims that all biographies are mysteries. Ninochka, with its fragments of memory and bits of detail, successfully reconstructs the dizzying and fascinating path that is history.

Eventually, Boym says, remembrance and nostalgia become experiences in themselves. Like conspiracies, they construct a self-inflicted reality and give biography a context. “The individual connection to history is the most important.”