They Sold Their Shadows

Summary

Alexander Voloshin’s 1953 rhyming mock epic Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood traces the upheavals from the Bolshevik Revolution to Pearl Harbor through the precarious lives of Russian émigrés in Los Angeles. The writer connects the poem’s satire to Voloshin’s own itinerant career, including work as a Hollywood extra and taxi driver, and emphasizes its depiction of refugees who offered their labor and images to the film industry while struggling to survive. Judging Boris Dralyuk’s English translation brilliant, the writer argues that this publication should rescue Voloshin from obscurity and establish his reputation in the West.

Highlights

• In Sidetracked, brilliantly translated by the accomplished Ukrainian-American poet, writer and translator Boris Dralyuk, Voloshin attempts to come to grips with the sweep of the twentieth century, from the Revolution to Pearl Harbor.
• Millions fled the collapsing Russian Empire and settled in continental Europe, Asia, New York and San Francisco.
• These tumbledown émigrés who had “sold their shadows”, as Dralyuk writes, offered themselves up to the movie studios of southern California, or opened restaurants with names like the Volga Boat, the Russian Bear and the Double Headed Eagle. The cliché of down-and-out refugees from Europe, juxtaposed with the high culture of the rich, was a staple of American films.
• No matter where you turn your eyes – things waiting to be satirized.

Notes

• The article portrays Alexander Voloshin almost as though he inhabited a higher order of being -- a Platonic auxiliary guardian, perhaps, or a divine spirit. Yet the upheavals of the two world wars produced a vast migration between realms: some souls ascended, while others descended. One might imagine that Nazi Germany’s invasion of Europe represented an invasion of this higher realm itself. On that reading, the article uses the fall of the Russian Empire as an analogue for the collapse of a hidden or “Secret Republic,” and describes the altered conditions of life that followed. Voloshin, once a guardian of that realm, is then reduced to driving a yellow taxi cab -- an image that nevertheless preserves his former role, as he transports others between worlds.

Source

Author

Cynthia Haven

Publication

The Times Literary Supplement

Date

August 7, 2026

URL

https://www.the-tls.com/regular-features/in-brief/sidetracked-alexander-voloshin-book-review-cynthia-haven ↗

Reviewed work

Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood