Please join us for a talk with author and literary critic Olga Breininger about her Russian-language novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union (Elena Shubina Publishers, 2017).
There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union is a pioneering attempt to bring the experience of reading authors such as Wallace, DeLillo, Pynchon or Ellis, onto Russian soil, and claim the former Soviet Union’s place in contemporary globalized, multicultural, increasingly digitalized world. A first-person female narrative, There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union explores the thin line separating unbounded freedom and global loneliness, the striving for knowledge and the desire for destruction, and seeks to re-define identity and belonging in transnational space. It is a story of a young woman, grown up in late Soviet Kazakhstan, who embarks onto a “chain of emigrations” in search of freedom and happiness only to experience losses and join the army of the new angry young men – ambitious, obsessively perfectionist, and disillusioned with nothing being real in the post-truth world.
