Příručka ruského debutanta – Shteyngart Gary (2007)

Twenty-five-year-old Russian Jew Vladimir Girskin survives as a regular clerk in a New York nonprofit organization that helps immigrants assimilate. He has an overweight, regretful American girlfriend, and according to his mother, he is definitely not building a career that matches his qualities. One day, however, a strange man named Rybakov visits him in the office, a 'war hero and psychotic,' and in exchange for American citizenship, he promises him a better life somewhere in Eastern Europe. Thus, Vladimir finds himself in the Eastern European wilderness shortly after the regime change. In the imaginary Pravě, 'the Paris of the nineties,' whose beauty is marred only by the shadow of a giant foot of a Stalin statue, the inconspicuous Vladimir shines. He multiplies the ranks of the Russian mafia, infiltrates the community of young Americans, and begins to rob them through a pyramid scheme genius in its simplicity. But nothing is as it seems at first glance... The Handbook of a Russian Debutant is a crazy farce, a caricature of places, times, and human characters, but also a serious treatise on what it means to come from a state that has collapsed, what it is like to be torn between two cultures, what it is like to be an immigrant.