In the past, I had been in one country or another because of other people: my parents, Svetlana, Ivan, Sean. But I was in Russia because I had looked at the literatures of the world and made a choice. Nobody had especially wanted me to come—indeed, the customs officer who stamped my passport had left a distinct impression of wishing me to be elsewhere—yet here I was. It was like when Isabel managed not to marry the guy with the cotton mills, and it was her first taste of victory—because “she had done what she preferred.” Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had
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