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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.
