“Here is the question I’m trying to answer: What will happen to me – an Americanized Russian-speaking novelist who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child – if I let myself float into the television-filtered head space of my former countrymen? Will I learn to love Putin as 85 percent of Russians profess to do? Will I dash to the Russian consulate on East 91st Street and ask for my citizenship back? … Or will I simply go insane?”