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2012
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Language (New words, slang, etc.) Foreign languages Languages Family Family structure Families--Social aspects Families--Social conditions Family life Structure, Family Family relationships Relationships, Family Domestic dog Canis canis Canis domesticus Canis familiarus domesticus Canis lupus familiaris Dog Canis familiarus Biography--Ancestry Relations with family Biography--Descendants Biography--Family AncestryCiter ce document
Michael Taugis, « Langue russe et mémoire soviétique dans "Tapka" de David Bezmozgis », La Revue russe, ID : 10.3406/russe.2012.2495
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David Bezmozgis is one of the most famous representatives of a generation of Russian- Jewish- American writers born in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. "Tapka", one of his first short stories published in 2003, is set in the 1980s. It is the story of a Russian dog called "Tapka", loved and betrayed by the six-year-old narrator and his seven-year-old cousin in Toronto where the dog's owners, the Nahumovskys, and the narrator's family have recently emigrated. The Nahumovskys come from Minsk, and the narrator's family from the Baltic States. Left in the care of the narrator and his cousin, Tapka is ultimately run over by a car as the narrator attempts to shift the responsibility for the dog onto his cousin. On the surface, this story seems to be essentially an education, a passage from innocence to experience, and an allegory on Soviet (Jewish) memory represented by "Tapka". My paper shows that the story also focuses on the relationship between two languages, Russian and English, between the mother tongue and the second language which all the characters have to learn as immigrants. This relationship turns out to be more complex and interesting than a mere conflict between two languages, in which one language eventually destroys the other : it is also a cross-cultural interweaving in which the linguistic domination of English is subtly subverted by the Russian signifier epitomized by "Tapka".