SOURCE: “Hopes and Nightmares of the Young,” in Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges Between (Ex)Soviet and American Women, edited by Susan Hardy Aiken, Adele Marie Barker, Maya Koreneva, and Ekaterina Stetsenko, Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 1994, pp. 266–78.

In the following essay, Koreneva discusses what Phillips and Elena Makarova reveal about the human condition in their short stories “Home” and “Needlefish,” respectively.

Both Jayne Anne Phillips and Elena Makarova started writing in the 1970s, a decade which, unlike the previous ones, aroused little hope in either the Soviet Union or the United States. Yet it was not a period of great social tensions or catastrophes. In the USSR, after a short-lived “thaw,” a time began which later came to be known as “the period of stagnation.” In the United States, the end of the infamous Vietnam war was followed by the Watergate revelations and ensuing scandal. Both...