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Presto, Jenifer Turygina, Lina 2025-08-22T20:24:01Z 2025-08-22 https://hdl.handle.net/1794/31522 This thesis examines the short fiction of Russian-born writers Nina Berberova (1901-1993) and Olga Zilberbourg (1979-) to explore how female émigré and immigrant authors articulate displacement through the motifs of loneliness, memory, and space. Though separated by time and geography, both writers reimagine the short story as a vessel for negotiating fractured identities and the emotional topography of migration. Drawing on literary anthropology, semiotic theory, and reader-response criticism, I argue that the short story’s formal properties—brevity, ambiguity, and fragmentation – mirror the epistemic structures of exile. Berberova’s final American stories distill the Russian literary tradition into sparse, elegiac forms, while Zilberbourg reconfigures émigré poetics for a 21st-century context, navigating linguistic hybridity and cultural in-betweenness. In their narratives, both authors resist assimilationist tropes and articulate survival as a creative, recursive act of authorship. Ultimately, their work reveals how literature written from dislocation does not seek to resolve the problems of exile, but to dwell in exilic complexity – and to speak from within it. en_US University of Oregon All Rights Reserved. Adaptation Diaspora Immigrant literature In-betweenness Women's writing “They Drink Tea": Everyday Loneliness and the Poetics of Place in Russophone American Short Stories (The Cases of Nina Berberova and Olga Zilberbourg) Dissertation or thesis M.A. masters Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program University of Oregonopen.access