A violent crime shattered Moscow native Anya Gillinson's world when she was thirteen years old, urging her family to leave Russia for the American dream. As a teenager raised in a deeply patriarchal Russian society, Anya found herself grappling with a fiercely independent America. Her candid and heartfelt memoir delves into the clash between these two cultures through the stories of her family. It explores how her upbringing in Russia, and the subsequent immigrant experience, shaped her sense of femininity - a concept with vastly different definitions on either side of the Atlantic. Dreaming in Russian pits the two competing identities of her immigrant self against one another. After over thirty years of living in America, in the grip of its indefatigable modernism, Gillinson has come to understand that her bones, brains, and womanhood remain deeply rooted in the soil of Russian patriarchy.

Anya's journey forces questions, yet in the end it leaves her without answers, but at least with a personal resolution - that three decades of living in America have brought her back to her Russian past, which forever predetermined her present and outlined her future.