Anya Ulinich has embraced the written word, writes Kevin Rabalais.

THEY PLACED HER IN front of an easel and told her to paint. Along with Anya Ulinich in the Moscow art school were other four-year-olds, each painting an identical still life. "Dried flowers, with fruit to the side," Ulinich says by phone from her home in Brooklyn. These were the first stages of a competitive Soviet program that would see some of these students to college and beyond.

"There were no surprises in my life," says Ulinich of her childhood and youth in Russia. "I lived in the same apartment in Moscow for 17 years. I stared out my window at an identical concrete high-rise. I knew I would go to art school. I knew exactly what I would do."

Ulinich could not have known, back then, that she would swap Russian for English to write one of the most talked about debut novels of the year. Petropolis, her rollicking tale of art and love, motherhood and immigration, follows chubby, mixed-raced Sasha Goldberg from dreary Siberia, where she enrols in art school and undergoes romantic misadventures that force her to flee to America as a mail-order bride.

The 34-year-old Ulinich has now lived half her life in America. Though traces of her mother tongue continue to inflect her English, she speaks with a feisty confidence about art and literature, politics and globalisation.

Much like Sasha Goldberg, Ulinich migrated with her family to Arizona. It was September, 1991, a month after the Soviet coup d'etat attempt. She remembers the shock of arrival and considers herself among the last generations to move from isolation in "a somewhat developed country". This has given her, she says, "a very Old World immigrant experience".

Ulinich often invokes those sacred names of the Motherland - Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov and Akhmatova - to describe her complicated relationship with Russia. She takes her title, Petropolis, and the novel's overarching theme from a poem by Osip Mandelstam.

In Ulinich's translation, Mandelstam's Petropolis ends with the lines: "The wax of immortality is melting/ O, if you are a star, Petropolis, your city/ Your brother, Petropolis, is dying."

Ulinich says, "I discovered Mandelstam when I was a teenager. He and Brodsky and Akhmatova: to my group of friends, they were like rock stars. We were probably more infatuated with their life stories at the time.

"Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope, was my favourite book. Just the idea of suffering so much for the sake of your art and never giving it up - that's what appealed to me then."

Ulinich's own suffering intensified upon arrival in Arizona.

"I call it my mute period," she says. "I was neither speaking Russian, because I didn't have anybody to speak with in Russian, nor was I speaking English, because my facilities were not very good. I was painting all along because that's what I did."

The new language and culture supplied Ulinich with an array of stories that invaded her art. "My paintings became filled with symbolic imagery," she says. "You almost had to read them from left to right. I was too sheepish still to tell a story, but I would sneak in bits of info in the paintings, and they soon became visual texts."

With her art training in Moscow and at the Art Institute of Chicago, Ulinich found work during the '90s dot-com boom as a web graphics designer. In conversation, she maintains the fiery and comedic timing that makes readers of Petropolis laugh out loud.

She describes scenes at work ("That place was a cult!") with "young men who never went home" and offers a resounding judgement on her brief experiences: "Everybody called it a revolution, this dot-com thing, but I knew it was not really a revolution."

Seeking escape, Ulinich began an MFA program in art at the University of California at Davis. There, teachers demanded that she relinquish her desire to turn her paintings into narratives. She began to seek solace in writing, but it was also the arrival of the first of two daughters that shifted Ulinich's fervour from art to literature.

"This kind of falling in love as a first-time mother really amazed me," she says. "I'd never been in love with anyone like that. I started thinking about what would happen if this child were taken away from me. That's how Petropolis started."

Ulinich began to write, in English, in half-hour "bits and pieces" between her studio work and while her six-month-old napped. By the time she began, Ulinich says, she had no doubt that she would continue writing in her second language.

"I have a very emotional, very loaded relationship with Russian," she says. "It's a kind of goo that I might sink in. I can't make it work for me; it works its tricks on me. English is almost like Lego bricks. I'm able to take the language and construct things out of it much more efficiently. When something is scary, I talk myself through it in English. Then it's no longer scary. I was on an aeroplane not long ago, and one of the engines failed. Not a big deal, because there were, like, four of them, but saying an engine failed in English is a lot less scary than saying an engine failed in Russian."

The Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski once called the Russian language "apocalyptic", but Ulinich's apprehensions about her mother tongue haven't stopped her from longing for the country she left as a teenager. She continues to visit Moscow, a city whose frenetic cultural and linguistic changes cause her to feel like an outsider. Most of all, Ulinich says, she misses the status that Russia bestows upon her artists and writers. "They are much more in the popular imagination," she says. "The only thing that writing a book got me is that my parents really began to respect me. They respected me for a couple of months. Then they said, 'Well, you wrote a novel, but you still can't drive a car'."

Petropolis is published by Scribe. Anya Ulinich will be a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

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