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The Pattersons: Expatriate and Native Son
Author(s) -
SALYS RIMGAILA
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the russian review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.136
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9434
pISSN - 0036-0341
DOI - 10.1111/russ.12084
Subject(s) - ideology , expatriate , mythology , realism , soviet union , identity (music) , history , law , sociology , literature , political science , aesthetics , art , politics
This article is concerned with how two generations of an African‐American family, the father Lloyd Patterson and the son James Patterson, constructed lives in the Soviet Union of the Stalin and post‐Stalin eras. Lloyd Patterson's ideological and economic decision to settle in the USSR allowed him to develop his talents and fulfill his potential in a manner that was impossible in the United States of the 1930s. The better known James (little Jimmy of Grigorii Aleksandrov's Circus ) negotiated identity successfully in three interrelated ways: through his cinematic myth; by the practice of Socialist Realism, both as a literary mode and in its ideological considerations during the late Soviet era; and in a multifaceted self‐identification with Russia's national poet, Aleksandr Pushkin.