About three-quarters of the way through Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s latest novel, “The Big Green Tent,” set in the Soviet Union after the Second World War, a character named Mikha stays up all night reading. In the morning, when he arrives at work late, overemotional from the night of reading and from the discovery that his colleagues have covered for him, Mikha is compelled to share his reading with an older co-worker. It is a set of photographs of manuscripts that could not be published in the Soviet Union, and one look at it is enough for the older man to grasp the gravity of the crime that is being confessed. He reports Mikha to the authorities, setting in motion a series of events that will end Mikha’s career and, ultimately, his life.
Back when many books were banned in the Soviet Union, books had that kind of power. The official publishing houses printed vast quantities of a tiny selection of titles. The underground canon—the samizdat—was also small, chosen nearly at random with questionable literary taste and eclectic political beliefs: retyped manuscripts of recently written unpublishable books; facsimile copies of rediscovered books from an earlier, freer era; and printed volumes smuggled into the country by proselytizers of various kinds. In another scene in “The Big Green Tent,” which will be published in the United States next year, a character comes across an entire discarded home library of unapproved books and discovers, to her disappointment, that she has already read all of them—meaning that she has read these physical copies, which once belonged to the parents of a friend.
A book can be an inspiration or a murder weapon. Ulitskaya is fascinated by these transformations, but even more so by the peculiar trajectories that create fate—the travels of a person, a picture, a book. If there is a strange journey to be traced, she cannot resist the retelling. On a warm July Saturday afternoon in Moscow, she gave a talk about an anthology of pieces devoted to the memory of the dissident poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya, her lifelong friend, who died last year. She noted Gorbanevskaya’s political activism and the persecution she faced. Gorbanevskaya was first arrested at the age of twenty, for associating with people who protested the Soviet invasion of Hungary, in 1956. She spent two years in a psychiatric hospital for daring to document the dissident movement, having helped found a newsletter that tracked arrests and dissident activities. In 1975, she was forced to emigrate. But the focus of Ulitskaya’s talk was Gorbanevskaya’s nonlinear private life. The poet never married but, like her mother, adopted a girl; she also had two biological sons. Both of her sons had children out of wedlock before marrying women who were not the children’s mothers. It fell to Gorbanevskaya to create connections among all these people. “She made friends of everyone; she made everyone love one another,” Ulitskaya said, and an extended family took shape. She died a happy death, sudden and peaceful. But she was penniless. As one of her sons sat in her Paris apartment trying to figure out how to pay for her burial, a friend’s widower called to offer his condolences—and ended up offering a cemetery plot as well, which he had bought for himself before remarrying. “And so she lies next to her friend, in a gifted grave,” Ulitskaya concluded.
It’s a great story. It also showcases the human qualities that Ulitskaya seems to prize most: personal loyalty—not to be confused with niceness, which Gorbanevskaya did not possess—and a boundless capacity for inclusion. Ulitskaya speaks of her friend with admiration as if for a member of a higher caste. “I wasn’t a dissident,” she explains. “I was a girl who washed the dishes in the kitchen while they talked. I remember all of them, but hardly any of them remembered me.” Now, at seventy-one, she has become a voice of moral authority for differently minded Russians, and one of Russia’s most famous writers.
In recent years, as Russia has grown politically repressive and culturally conservative, Ulitskaya’s fiction, which addresses both religion and politics, has moved in for a confrontation. Increasingly, Ulitskaya has also become a public intellectual. During the anti-Putin protests of 2011 and 2012, Ulitskaya joined the board of the League of Voters, which tried to coördinate and direct the disparate components of the protests. She continued speaking out even after the protests were crushed; by the end of this past summer, she, along with a handful of other writers and a couple of musicians, had been branded a traitor for her opposition to the war in Ukraine. The musicians in the group have had their concerts cancelled all over the country. The writers’ punishment may be slower in coming, but already Ulitskaya is the object of regular assaults by Kremlin mouthpieces in such venues as the newspaper Izvestia, which apes the rhetoric used against writers who were excommunicated by Soviet authorities, half a century ago. Like some of those writers, she is widely read outside Russia. She has amassed many of Europe’s most prestigious literary prizes, even as she has come under attack at home.
The Gorbanevskaya event was part of a haphazardly organized city-funded series, and Ulitskaya spoke under a big white tent in a park in a historically working-class neighborhood. The moderator, a young, bearded book reviewer, approached her minutes before the event to rehearse the format. He had to step off the wooden path and stand on the grass so as not to tower over Ulitskaya, who is barely five feet tall. Once she got a look at him, she said, with evident satisfaction, “You look just like your mother.” The moderator’s mother is a scholar and translator of French literature and part of Ulitskaya’s extraordinarily large social circle of Moscow intelligentsia. After the event, it emerged that the organizers, seemingly unaccustomed to dealing with speakers of Ulitskaya’s renown, had failed to set up a table for signing books, so Ulitskaya sat cross-legged on the ground. Her older fans looked shocked, even as they reached into their bags for copies of her books—she has published eight novels and numerous short-story collections.
Ulitskaya agreed to the reading as a result of a misunderstanding: she thought that the young woman who called her with the request was someone else. But it was a happy accident: the people present gave Ulitskaya the idea and the opportunity to do some quiet fund-raising for a Russian-Ukrainian publishing project. With Russia fighting a very popular war against Ukraine, it was a difficult task. But, dating back to Alexander Herzen, who spoke out against Russia’s war with Poland, in the mid-nineteenth century, members of the Russian intelligentsia have supported nations victimized by the empire. Ulitskaya is one of the few people still carrying out this duty.
Ulitskaya’s fiction is often, like her talk about Gorbanevskaya, storytelling reduced to plot. She does not inhabit her characters; rather, she describes and observes them through a narrator who seems to hover at an equal distance from each one. In “The Big Green Tent,” as in her other novels, she often favors capsule descriptions over character development: “She was barely fifty, but to her daughter she appeared old and uninteresting. Raisa Ilinichna shared this view of herself.” She makes little use of dialogue and, unusual in Russian fiction, does not delve into the tortured workings of her characters’ psyches, though she acknowledges that tortured they are: “Feelings of guilt and disgust were killing him, and the idea of suicide was constantly lurking in the margins of his consciousness.” The result is compelling, addictive reading, driven entirely by the desire to learn what happens next. Every time I start reading something of hers, I am initially taken aback by the flatness of her characters’ emotional landscape and her transparently convoluted plots. And then, after a certain point, I can’t stop. In Russia, Ulitskaya’s books sell ten times as many copies as any other literary fiction.
A gift for rendering the vagaries of fate was evident long before Ulitskaya started writing fiction. Tatyana Borisova, an old friend of hers, told me that when Gorbanevskaya was asked who Ulitskaya was—in fact, Gorbanevskaya was asked this quite often, because the young Ulitskaya, though short and short-haired and flat-chested, the exact opposite of the classic Russian beauty, was by all accounts possessed of a magnetic sexuality—she would say, “ ‘Lus’ka?’,” using an intimate diminutive for Lyudmila. “ ‘Who is Lus’ka? Lus’ka is a writer. Yes, that’s who she is.’ ”
But, before becoming a published author, Ulitskaya spent decades on the edges of Soviet society, to which people who lacked roles in official state structures were relegated. She started on a conventional enough track. Her parents were highly educated ethnic Jews, her mother a biologist and her father an engineer and inventor. After high school, Ulitskaya worked as a lab assistant on a long-running brain study, a job she secured by successfully decapitating a live baby rat. This gave her the understanding that a momentary lapse in moral vigilance can set one on a path that one would have thought unimaginable. “On Judgment Day, I personally will be standing knee-deep in decapitated rats,” she has written. In her case, it led to working with the brains of larger and larger mammals, both living and dead. In the case of most of the characters in “The Big Green Tent,” it leads to collaborating with the K.G.B.
Moscow State University, where Ulitskaya wanted to study, had an unofficial but strictly enforced quota on the number of Jews admitted, but in 1962, after applying three times in two years, she was admitted to the biology department. Like many women in the Soviet Union, Ulitskaya married early. Her husband was a physicist. They divorced when she was twenty-five, and about to graduate from university. She got a job at the Institute of Genetics, and soon remarried—this time, her husband was a young geneticist. The field of genetics had been nearly eliminated under Stalin, who believed in the singular power of the environment to shape all living things, and demanded that the research of Soviet scientists comply with his belief. Following Stalin’s death, in 1953, genetics was gradually re-legitimatized. Scientists returned from internal exile or emerged from hiding to resume their work, and Ulitskaya joined four other scientists in a laboratory. Young and well-educated, they were avid consumers and occasional distributors of samizdat. At one point, Ulitskaya was given the chance to retype a copy of an underground translation of Leon Uris’s “Exodus.” The task was so important that Ulitskaya did not even notice how much she disliked the writing. “Now that you can buy it in any bookstore, no one does, because it’s so mediocre,” she said. “But back then I found it insanely interesting, because we didn’t know anything about Israel.” She typed poorly, so she paid the lab’s typist to do the job. The typist turned the novel, the typewriter, and the five young scientists in to the K.G.B. They got off easy: they were held and questioned for less than twenty-four hours and then released from jail—and from their jobs. The lab was shut down.
In “The Big Green Tent,” this story turns into two: one about a typist, a friend, and a typewriter that ends up with the K.G.B., and the one about Mikha’s reading indiscretion, which starts him on the path to full-on dissident activity and then to jail. Ulitskaya chose a different route. Like many intellectuals of her generation, she sought refuge from the Soviet system in the underground practice of Christianity. And, after losing her job, she took advantage of an opportunity that Soviet society afforded its disenfranchised women: for the next decade, she focussed entirely on her family. She cared for her mother as she died of cancer, and she had two sons with her second husband.
Then Ulitskaya did what she still considers one of the bravest things she has ever done: she divorced her husband. “I had two very small children, no job, and no support network to speak of,” she said. She had fallen in love with an artist named Andrey Krasulin, but she claims that that was not the reason for the divorce; in any case, she did not marry him. In the end, she had what she considers to be the quintessential Russian woman’s experience: that of bringing up her children alone. After the Second World War, which led to a shortage of men from which the Soviet Union never fully recovered, social forces and government policies combined to create the female-headed household as a distinct—and common—institution. Ulitskaya’s divorce settlement got her an apartment in Moscow’s relatively comfortable and prestigious Writers’ Union quarter—though she was not yet a writer—and alimony payments that, combined with her talent for making connections and her having the time to stand in lines for hours on end, put food on the table. But when her younger son started attending preschool, in the late seventies, she decided to go back to work.
Ulitskaya was invited to take on the role of dramaturge at the Jewish Chamber Musical Theatre. She uses the word “role” advisedly: the theatre performed in Yiddish, but not a single member of the troupe spoke the language. Its existence could be attributed only to the hypnotic powers of its founder, a dancer, director, and composer named Yuri Sherling. In the mid-seventies, Sherling, then in his early thirties, convinced the Soviet authorities that the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, a failed attempt at creating a Jewish settlement on the Soviet-Chinese border, should have its own theatre. I have seen the building constructed for the theatre there: it is the largest glass-and-concrete structure for hundreds of miles. Sherling’s troupe played there only once in the theatre’s eight-year existence; the rest of the time, it staged Yiddish-language musicals in Moscow. Ulitskaya brushed up on her German, and learned the Hebrew alphabet; the combination placed her in the general vicinity of understanding Yiddish.
During the next three years, Ulitskaya found that she liked the theatre and hated most of what was written for the stage. “It occurred to me that writing my own play would be easier than rewriting someone else’s bad play,” she said. In 1982, when she was thirty-nine, she quit, completed a yearlong course on writing for animation—which is the extent of her formal literary training and the source of her unshakable belief that every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end—and started writing plays, many for puppet theatres. Some of them are still being staged.
In the mid-eighties, Mikhail Gorbachev declared the era of perestroika and glasnost; censors loosened the reins on literary publishing, and a variety of journals and magazines filled with previously unpublishable writing. Press runs increased exponentially, reaching into the millions for some literary journals. Ulitskaya had started writing stories; she sent them to five magazines and got five rejection letters.
These first short stories, like the subsequent novellas and novels, traced the shaping and the invention of lives: loves that are improbably found or, even more improbably, carried through decades; unlikely alliances of every sort; the crooked journeys of people and things through space and time. They made reference to facts of public life that had been kept silent for most of the Soviet period and had now become topics of extensive discussion—the Gulag, the Holocaust, Jews. But these topics were merely the background for Ulitskaya’s study of her characters’ small lives. At times, her stories read like benevolent gossip, and, unlike much of the writing that was emerging then, they were not anti-Soviet; rather, they were profoundly un-Soviet. She evoked a world in which nothing was more important than the private lives of individuals.
Ulitskaya’s first published short fiction appeared in 1990, in a magazine called Ogonyok, which means “Little Flame,” launching her career and what she apologetically calls her “Cinderella story.” First, she got a phone call from Sergei Kaledin, then one of Russia’s most successful fiction writers. “I knew who he was, of course—he was at the top of his fame,” Ulitskaya told me. “He says, ‘Listen, I liked your story.’ I say, ‘Thank you, that is very good to hear.’ And he says, ‘Do you have any more? Where do you live, anyway?’ And twenty minutes later Seryozha walks through the door.” Even before looking at Ulitskaya’s other stories, he told her, “All right, we’ll make a book”—and over the next couple of years Kaledin and his wife, a book editor, shepherded Ulitskaya’s first story collection, “Poor Relations,” to publication. The book has stayed in print for twenty years and has been published in ten countries.
After the success of her short stories, Ulitskaya tried writing something longer. Her novel “Sonechka” was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize in 1993 and awarded the Prix Médicis Étranger in 1996. The French prize is given to writers whose “fame does not yet match their talent.” Ulitskaya’s opinion of her talent, however, is tempered. By the time she became a published author, she felt she was too old to want to compare herself to others. “I hold a sober view of my abilities,” she claims. It took her years to stop feeling like an impostor, and she still often mentions her lack of formal literary training. Her first profession casts a slight shadow over her success. Ulitskaya confesses that the void in her life left by genetics has recently started hurting more, perhaps because there is no pretending that she could ever go back, not at the age of seventy-one, with science having advanced beyond recognition.
But writing has given her a chance to relive the past, which she does in all her books. “I can’t change what happened, but I can think about it,” she said. “I can analyze. And then you start to see details you couldn’t see when you were inside that time.” Her books trace the progression of her life, in relatively straightforward chronological order. The early short stories take place in the fifties and sixties, when she was growing up. “Sonechka” takes its protagonist, a librarian, from the Second World War through the seventies. Published in 1993, it also contains a lesbian romance and even the tame outlines of a lesbian sex scene: “Yasya led her into the room that had just been declared the maiden’s chamber but was fated never to shelter any maidens. They climbed into Yasya’s bed. Yasya removed the band from her thick ponytail and as they stroked each other’s hair they made up fully.” The portrayal of such a romance is unimaginable in a mainstream Russian book today; it would run afoul of the newly conservative cultural norms and legislation.
Gradually, Ulitskaya tackled bigger stories. The eponymous protagonist of her second novel, “The Kukotsky Case,” is a gynecologist whose practice focusses increasingly on abortion, which was then illegal in the Soviet Union. Kukotsky is based largely on Ulitskaya’s father, though he was an engineer and not a doctor. Kukotsky’s daughter, Tanya, works in a brain-research lab, where she preps samples of ever larger mammals until she realizes that she would have no reservations, if asked, about prepping a human baby:
She quits the lab to lead the life of a bohemian. The moral epiphany is Ulitskaya’s own, though she did not quit but was fired. The book, which preceded Russia’s current ultraconservative phase by nearly a decade, won the Russian Booker Prize, in 2001. Ulitskaya was the first woman to be awarded what was then the country’s most important literary honor. She was now far better known than her former benefactor Kaledin or any of the literary stars of the nineties, such as Peter Aleshkovsky and Evgeny Popov. Along the way, she lost her religion.
Russian Orthodoxy had been Ulitskaya’s way out of what she calls the “airless space” of the Soviet Union in the nineteen-seventies. “I was ready to accept any offer that suggested an exit from this eternally flat space,” she says. “You should say thank you I didn’t become a Satanist.” Nor did she become an observant Jew, as did some other ethnic Jews of her acquaintance. She associated Judaism with her grandfather, a watchmaker from the shtetl, who studied the Torah until he died but, she said, “had no use for Tolstoy.” She attended services with a small group of co-conspirators at a priest’s house in a town a few hours outside of Moscow. “It was the discovery of a new kind of collectivism, a community of different but like-minded people,” she wrote in a personal essay published in a 2012 collection of her nonfiction. “There was no force, only a shared desire to serve one another.”
Once the Soviet regime collapsed, the Russian Orthodox Church gathered all its parts, including the groups that had been underground and the masses who had been passive, and merged with the state in all its newly corrupt and tasteless glory. Church property was reclaimed, wrested not only from factories and bureaucratic institutions but also from schools and hospitals that happened to be occupying valuable real estate. A new church was constructed on seemingly every street corner, the funds collected from entrepreneurs allied with the government. The Bible became a mandatory subject in grade school. The head of the Church wore a wristwatch worth forty thousand dollars.
In an attempt to figure out what Christianity should be, Ulitskaya wrote her most ambitious novel, “Daniel Stein, Interpreter.” Published in 2006, it is based on the life of Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who survived the Second World War by pretending to be a Gentile, worked as an interpreter for the Germans, managed to use his job to help three hundred Jews escape death, later hid in a convent, then converted to Christianity, became a Catholic priest named Brother Daniel, and emigrated to Israel in the nineteen-fifties. The novel was about faith and freedom, rather than about love and life, and although it still had a beginning, a middle, and an end, long stretches of it read like a selection of archival material. The themes of the book—Jewish-Christian relations and the Holocaust—were unfamiliar to most readers in Russia, where discussion of both religion and the Holocaust had been banned for decades. “I was writing that book for two dozen people who I thought were engaged with the subject,” she says. “Daniel Stein” sold about two and a half million copies in Russia and was awarded the Bolshaya Kniga—Big Book—prize, which had overtaken the Booker as the country’s most important literary award.
But the English translation flopped in the United States. Ulitskaya’s previous books hadn’t sold particularly well here, but they were generally well reviewed. “Daniel Stein” was barely noticed, and that may have spared Ulitskaya some unpleasant moments: she closely follows the fate of her books in all their editions. “A wish-fulfillment fantasy of the conversion of the Jews” was one of the kinder lines from Melvin Jules Bukiet, in the Washington Post. To a Western reader, “Daniel Stein” feels as if it had been written in a vacuum. Although Ulitskaya undertook extensive research for the project, many passages read as though she were unaware of most of what has been written about the Holocaust in the past half century and about Jewish-Christian relations for a far longer period of time. But this may also account for the book’s—and Ulitskaya’s—spectacular popularity in Russia: she doggedly, and effectively, works to build a bridge between Russian culture, where, as recently as the seventies, she wrote, “no one had spoken of the subconscious,” and the larger world from which it was isolated. The book was an attempt, finally, to examine what it meant to be a Christian, now that nearly all Russians said they were Christians. “I may not have been aware of it, but I sensed the question was in the air,” she said.
The Russian Orthodox Church’s official press denounced “Daniel Stein” as “anti-Christian,” making Ulitskaya’s break with the Church final and public. It is the classic predicament of the Russian writer: novels are read as manifestos, prescriptions, and protests. Ulitskaya accepted the burden with no apparent difficulty; she had things to say, and more and more people were willing to listen. The worse things got in her country, the better she became at articulating its problems. In the late nineties and early two-thousands, she began organizing small-scale charity projects—helping a homeless family or a single juvenile facility—and writing about them.
She also launched her first venture as a publisher, a children’s-book series called “The Other, the Others, for Others”—a collection of short volumes that tackle cultural topics ranging from food to family. The book on families, which includes eleven lines on same-sex unions, got Ulitskaya in trouble. The detached, anthropological tone of the passage would make most Americans cringe. But it was enough to draw the ire of the prosecutor of a provincial Russian city, and the author of the book, Vera Timenchik, was dragged in for questioning several times earlier this year and threatened with charges of spreading propaganda about homosexuality and incest. Ulitskaya spoke publicly about the interrogations and said that she would be willing to testify, but the case then seemed to disappear. Apparently, the prosecutor’s office did not want to take on someone so well loved.
In 2008, Ulitskaya became one of several Russian writers who accepted an invitation to correspond publicly with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon who was Russia’s best-known political prisoner. In 2003, Khodorkovsky was jailed for tax evasion, but many Russians believe that his actual crime was insubordination to the Kremlin. Now he was trying to build a political platform from jail. His other high-profile correspondents were Boris Akunin, an author of best-selling historical fiction, and Boris Strugatsky, a science-fiction writer. In their letters, the men occasionally clashed as they debated the comparative advantages of democracies and dictatorships, the future of alternative energy, and the limitations of trying to predict the future. But Ulitskaya acted like a master interviewer, fleshing out the portrait of a man she found bewildering: he had been a true believer in Communism at a time when she thought such people were extinct, and had turned into a fervent capitalist. She had also, she confessed, found him suspect because of his wealth. “I feel ashamed for the wealthy,” she wrote. “I admit that I am prejudiced.” Their correspondence was published in 2009.
He wrote to her:
The correspondence helped bolster Khodorkovsky’s reputation; even in prison, he emerged as the leading critical voice in Russia. Late last year, after Khodorkovsky had spent ten years in prison, Putin pardoned him on the unspoken condition that he stay out of Russia and Russian politics. Following a brief period of silence, Khodorkovsky, who now lives in Switzerland, started commenting on Russian politics; he has also re-launched a foundation for social change in Russia and funded several projects, including joint Russian-Ukrainian ventures that have involved Ulitskaya. But his forced exile has rendered him less relevant to Russians. Akunin now spends most of the year out of the country, explaining that he finds the environment toxic. Strugatsky died. That has left barely a handful of prominent non-nationalist public intellectuals, including Ulitskaya.
This year, Ulitskaya became the de-facto head of Russian PEN, the writers’-advocacy organization, whose Russian chapter had long been quiet. Under her leadership, it quickly turned into one of the few voices in Russia criticizing the war in Ukraine; its revamped Web site has become a repository of antiwar articles and statements. That, in turn, has made her the object of attacks. In late August, the president of Russian PEN, the seventy-seven-year-old novelist Andrei Bitov, who had not been active in years, issued a vitriolic open letter accusing Ulitskaya of having staged a coup. A few days later, a large banner went up on one of Moscow’s central avenues, featuring portraits of five people—two rock stars, a journalist, and two writers, one of them Ulitskaya—next to an American flag, with the words “Are You Living Off Their Bucks?” Within a few months, Ulitskaya had gone from being too popular for the prosecutor’s office to tangle with to being someone too dangerous to be allied with.
Several days after the talk in Moscow, she travelled to Salzburg to collect the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the country’s highest literary prize. Along the way, she wrote an essay for Der Spiegel about the experience of being a Russian writer receiving a European prize in 2014, and the Russian text went viral. “Culture has suffered a crushing defeat, and we, people of culture, are helpless to change our state’s suicidal politics,” it read. “Goodbye, Europe. I’m afraid we will never be able to join the European family of nations.” When she returned to Moscow, in late August, ITAR-TASS, a state news agency, asked her to hold a press conference about receiving the prize. Two hours before the event, she was informed that the press conference had been cancelled; supposedly, a pipe had burst. The burst-pipe excuse is an old Soviet standby for cancelling anything anywhere. Ulitskaya may be the only person who lived through the previous period of blatant repression as an active reader and has entered the current one as a professional writer. And that, she says, is one of the many lucky coincidences of her life.
A sort of wondrous optimism, which comes across in all of her writing and her interviews, sets her apart from almost every Russian writer, past and present. The coincidences and twists that populate her books fill her with the joy of discovery. She was thrilled when she and I found a decent café in the back of an unremarkable Moscow building. To appreciate how unusual this makes Ulitskaya, against the desolate background of Russian literature, consider the word prekrasnodushiye. It denotes an optimistic world view—it means, literally, “fine soulhood”—and it is a put-down.
Ulitskaya spends part of the year in a tiny apartment in the Italian countryside, near Genoa. She bought it a couple of years ago, and, she says, it was “the smartest thing I have ever done, because that’s the only place I can work.” She finds Moscow, which she once loved intensely, increasingly difficult to take: it is dirty, loud, inconvenient, and more and more hostile. In 2000, she moved into a larger apartment in the Writers’ Union quarter. Her husband has an apartment next door. He is Andrey Krasulin, now seventy-nine, the artist she fell in love with thirty-seven years ago. While she was a divorced single mother, she says, they were locked in a battle of wills. After seventeen years, it ended, in what she calls “a perfectly honest, dignified draw”—and marriage. It is a union that involves more physical distance than many marriages, and more mutual interest and creative cross-pollination than most.
Four years ago, Ulitskaya received a diagnosis of Stage III breast cancer. She underwent a mastectomy in Israel, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. Several friends went through cancer diagnoses and treatment at the same time, and none of them were as lucky. Afterward, she wrote about the experience in several articles that she collected, along with other personal writings, in an anthology called “Discarded Relics.” She also spoke to journalists about the cancer and the treatments, and was filmed for a Russian documentary on living with the disease. None of these are things that Russian women of her generation, or Russian writers of any generation, would do: the former generally conceal their bodies in shame, and the latter tend not to entertain mortality. “It’s just that I have things to say,” she explains. “I want to tell people not to be scared and to face their disease. There are treatments available. My mother died thirty years ago of a cancer with which she could have lived ten or thirteen years more with the kinds of treatment available today. And this is the strongest argument there is for living in this country of ours: you can be an educator here every waking hour—while living at home.” Another way to look at it is that in Russia information is a scarce resource.
“Our generation—the boys and girls born in 1943—were extremely lucky,” she insists. “I was born late enough so I don’t remember the war or the hunger. We were poor, we faced all sorts of limitations, but I never knew the pain of hunger. But I do remember Stalinism, and I remember Stalin’s funeral. I still have those images in my mind, and I have written about them. Then we saw people getting released from the camps: my grandfather was released and I saw him for the first time in my life. Then there was the Khrushchev era, the hopes of that. Then Brezhnev sucked all the air out—that was my generation’s most difficult period.” She skips over the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the most exciting period for Russian intellectuals, and the time of her rise to literary stardom. From the vantage point of Russia in 2014, an authoritarian country at war, the brief period of post-Soviet elation appears irrelevant.
It is a strikingly selective narrative. I suggested to her that the story could be told differently. “You were born during the worst war in the history of humanity,” I said. “As soon as your family began to recover, the Stalin anti-Semitic campaign hit, and your mother lost her job. You came of age in an era of great hope, but then you lost your own job—indeed, your chosen profession. And your entire generation had its hopes dashed. The bulk of your adult years passed in the era you describe as ‘airless.’ Then it was all over and it seemed that you and your peers triumphed—only to have history turned back again. Soon enough, your books will be banned in this country.”
She nodded. “Yes, we tell the stories we want to tell,” she said. “I increasingly think I should describe myself not as Cinderella but as Little Red Riding Hood—I’ll be eaten before it’s all over.”
She paused and then said, “But maybe I won’t live long enough to see that happen.” ♦
