The article sets the goal to investigate the modes of depicting the spaces of Post-Soviet Russia and the fictional country Absurdistan through the lens of perception of the main character Misha Weiberg. The novel is written by the American writer and native of the USSR Gary Shteyngart who has become one of the founders of the American Russian-Jewish literature made on the English language continuing the tradition of so-called “translinguistic” writers that means the authors who use an adopted language in their creativity. He, like his characters, is distinguished by the cultural amalgamation included Jewish, Russian and American components of identity. In his literary works he focuses on the lives of Russian-Jewish immigrants whose destiny brought them to different countries. The article attempts to trace how cultural-historical, biographical and close readings approaches allow revealing in the writer’s creativity the intertwinement of diverse cultural codes, references to the Soviet past and the “nostalgia for the present” that leads to reproducing the American stereotypes about the USSR and the Soviet stereotypes about America which keep functioning in conscious of people even after the collapse of the USSR. The results of the research come to the conclusion that combining sarcasm, grotesque, compassion directed to people, who screwed by fate in opposite to frauds taken the advantage of the collapse of the USSR, Shteyngart creates the political satirical adventure novel which addresses complex problems of the contemporary world that is teared apart by contradictions.
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