Ludmila Ulitskaya

An orphaned poet, a gifted pianist and a budding photographer meet in a mid-20th-century Moscow school and eventually embody the heroism, folly, compromise and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. By the author of The Funeral Party.

A Novel

The Big Green Tent

As a group of Russian immgrants attends the deathbed of Alik, a charismatic artist, they reminisce about their individual relationships with him, argue about the past, and worry about their Russian homeland as they coup against Gorbachev unfolds, in an evocative story of Russian TmigrT life in New York City. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

The Funeral Party

One of Russia’s most renowned literary figures and a Man Booker International Prize nominee, Ludmila Ulitskaya presents what may be her final novel. Jacob’s Ladder is a family saga spanning a century of recent Russian history—and represents the summation of the author’s career, devoted to sharing the absurd and tragic tales of twentieth-century life in her nation. Jumping between the diaries and letters of Jacob Ossetsky in Kiev in the early 1900s and the experiences of his granddaughter Nora in the theatrical world of Moscow in the 1970s and beyond, Jacob’s Ladder guides the reader through some of the most turbulent times in the history of Russia and Ukraine, and draws suggestive parallels between historical events of the early twentieth century and those of more recent memory. Spanning the seeming promise of the prerevolutionary years, to the dark Stalinist era, to the corruption and confusion of the present day, Jacob’s Ladder is a pageant of romance, betrayal, and memory. With a scale worthy of Tolstoy, it asks how much control any of us have over our lives—and how much is in fact determined by history, by chance, or indeed by the genes passed down by the generations that have preceded us into the world.

Jacob's Ladder

A new collection of stories by the acclaimed Ludmila Ulitskaya, masterfully translated into English "[A] magnificent collection . . . [by] a writer of boundless tenderness."--Geneviève Brisac, Le Monde "Centrifugal, pensive, often elusive stories by one of the greatest living Russian writers (and leading anti-Putinist). . . . The stories are marvels of economy and the unexpected twist, each a memorable tour de force. . . . A welcome introduction to the short fiction of an essential writer."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) While we can feel, know, and study the body, the soul refuses definition. Where does it begin and end? What does the soul have to do with love? Does it exist at all, and if so, does it outlast the body? Or are the soul and body really one and the same? These are questions posed by the characters who inhabit this book of stories by the award-winning Russian writer Ludmila Ulitskaya. A woman believes that the best way to control her life is to control her death. A landscape photographer wonders if the beauty he has witnessed can triumph over decay. A coroner dedicated to science is confronted by a startling physical anomaly, a lonely widow experiences an extraordinary transformation, a woman whose life is devoted to language finds words slipping away from her. In these eleven stories, artfully rendered into English by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Ulitskaya maps the edges of our lives, tracing a delicate geography of the soul.

Stories

The Body of the Soul

The childless widow of a Russian-Jewish ex-revolutionary, Medea Georgievna Sinopy Mendez is the heart of a large family of nieces and nephews who, with their families and friends, gather each spring and summer at her home.

Medea and Her Children

Svetlana Alexievich

Nina Gorlanova

Margarita Sharapova

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

Olʹga Slavnikova

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of free speech (and publishing), Russian women have become a force in the world of letters. Whereas in the past they were known chiefly as literary widows or devoted wives, occasionally as poets or critics, and only very rarely as novelists, today they are beginning to dominate publishing lists in fiction and non-fiction alike.NINEincludes three internationally known names--Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Ludmila Ulitskaya, and Svetlana Alexiyevich--as well as half a dozen other respected women authors appearing here for the first time in English. Who and what you will find inNINE: Ludmila Petrushevskaya's absurd middle-aged heroine (in "Waterloo Bridge") finds she has fallen in love with a character in a movie. Seeing the film again and again, she experiences the romantic love she never had in real life. "Petrushevskaya's genius consists in her ability to seize on the disparate details of everyday life and render them as a single perfect whole, in which even the most unpalatable reality is made beautiful by the perfection of her art." Ludmila Ulitskaya's "Diana" and "End of the Story" look at women who lie with verve just to escape dreary reality. "Permeated with a tolerant humorous warmth, Ulitskaya's stories exemplify that strand in the humanist tradition that neither denounces nor deifies, but attempts to understand human psychology in its infinitely numerous manifestations." Svetlana Alexiyevich, a Byelorussian dissident, constructs powerful narrative collages out of "live human voices" culled from her interviews with witnesses to and participants in the most shattering national events. "She follows life rather than trying to invent it and she does so with great talent and keen vision." Her "Landscape of Loneliness" shows how tragic social circumstances deprive people of the ability to experience and enjoy love. Olga Slavnikova, a prolific young author from Yekaterinburg, depicts provincial life in a town where most of the men are involved in the illegal mining and cutting of precious stones. "Krylov's Childhood" combines memorable characters with ethnographic detail. Maria Arbatova--a leading feminist famed for her frank, outspoken and witty style--is Russia's Erica Jong. "My Name is Woman" takes place in an abortion clinic where the heroine reflects on her failed love affair and women's submissive role in love and life. Nina Gorlanova sets "Lake Joy" in her native Siberian city of Perm--in the small, closed world of a maternity ward. As a new life is born their suburb is being flooded and they are moved to new homes to start a new life. Anastasia Gosteva takes the reader on an unusual journey around India and America ("Closing Down America"). The heroine's attempt to run away from herself and an unrequited love is in fact a desperate effort to come to terms with who she really is. Margarita Sharapova draws on her unique personal experience as a circus animal tamer to describe the world of popular entertainment. "Brilliantly crafted, inspired prose. . . unputdownable." Natalia Smirnova paints a disquieting picture of a provincial town in the Urals where two cultivated women must survive amidst crude working-class surroundings ("The Women and the Shoemakers"). "Her prose is deep and subtle but by no means female."

Nine of Russia's Foremost Women Writers

Translated from the Russian by Diane Nemec Ignashev The central character in Ludmila Ulitskaya’s celebrated novel The Kukotsky Enigma is a gynecologist contending with Stalin’s prohibition of abortions in 1936. But, in the tradition of Russia’s great family novels, the story encompasses the history of two families and unfolds in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the ruins of ancient civilizations on the Black Sea. Their lives raise profound questions about family heritage and genetics, nurture and nature, and life and death. In his struggle to maintain his professional integrity and to keep his work from dividing his family, Kukotsky confronts the moral complexity of reproductive science. Winner of the 2001 Russian Booker Prize and the basis for a blockbuster television miniseries, The Kukotsky Enigma is an engrossing, searching novel by one of contemporary literature’s most brilliant writers.

The Kukotsky Enigma

Rudolf Maier, a young microbiologist working on a plague vaccine, is summoned to Moscow to deliver a progress report to his superiors. Inadvertently, he carries the virus with him from the lab. When his illness is discovered, the state machinery turns with terrifying efficiency, rounding up dozens of people. But for many, the distinction between this enforced, life-sparing isolation and the constant churn of political surveillance and arrests is barely detectable, and personal tragedy is not completely averted. Based on real events in the Stalinist Russia of the 1930s, this gripping novel, written in the late 1980s and rediscovered by the author during lockdown - and never before translated into English - surfaces uncomfortable truths about the current Russian regime and the pandemic crisis. Includes a new afterord by the author.

Just the Plague

Many already see Daniel Stein, Interpreter, which won the Russian National Literary Prize, as the Great Russian novel of our time. Indeed, Ludmila Ulitskaya has earned accolades abroad for this groundbreaking work, now available in English. The novel tells the story of Daniel Stein, a Polish Jew who miraculously survives the Holocaust by working for the Gestapo as an interpreter. This charade allows him not only to save himself, but to help hundreds of others by sharing vital information with those in peril. After the war, he converts to Catholicism, and emigrates to Israel where he creates a Christian community. Daniel's willingness to communicate with all cultures stands as a symbol of love, humanity and tolerance. The author beautifully renders the life, of a modern saint, who inevitably ends his life as a martyr, the victim of his own will to help others at all costs. Though seemingly impossible, the life and destiny of Daniel Stein are not an invention -- the character is based on the life of Oswald Rufeisen, the real Brother Daniel, a Carmelite Monk who lived at Stella Maris monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa and who died in Israel in 1998.

Daniel Stein, Interpreter

Li︠u︡dmila Ulit︠s︡kai︠a︡

Short fiction by an critically acclaimed Russian author explores the diverse faces and implications of love in a collection that includes Queen of Spades, Angel, The Dauntless Women of the Russian Steppe, and Sonechka, the title story.

Sonechka

August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN? This marvelous group of individuals inhabits the first novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya to be published in English, a book that was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and has been praised wherever translated editions have appeared. Simultaneously funny and sad, lyrical in its Russian sorrow and devastatingly keen in its observation of character, The Funeral Party introduces to our shores a wonderful writer who captures, wryly and tenderly, our complex thoughts and emotions confronting life and death, love and loss, homeland and exile.

Li͡udmila Ulit͡skai͡a

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The Los Angeles Times said of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s The Funeral Party, “In America we have friends, family, lovers, and parents–four kinds of love. Could it really be that in Russia they have more? Ludmila Ulitskaya makes it seem so.” In Sonechka: A Novella and Stories, Ulitskaya brings us tales of these other loves in her richly lyrical prose, populated with captivating and unusual characters. In “Queen of Spades,” Anna, a successful ophthalmologic surgeon in her sixties; her daughter, Katya; and Katya’s teenage daughter and young son live in constant terror of Anna’s mother, a domineering, autocratic, aging former beauty queen. In “Angel,” a closeted middle-aged professor marries an uneducated charwoman for love of her young son, raising the child in his image. In “The Orlov-Sokolovs,” perfectly matched young lovers are pulled apart by the Soviet academic bureaucracy. And in the stunning novella “Sonechka,” the heroine, a bookworm turned muse turned mother, reveals a love and loyalty at once astounding in its generosity and grotesque in its pathos. In these stories, love and life are lived under the radar of oppression, in want of material comfort, in obeisance to or matter-of-fact rejection of the pervasive restrictions of Soviet rule. If living well is the best revenge, then Ludmila Ulitskaya’s characters, in choosing to embrace the unique gifts that their lives bring them, are small heroes of the quotidian, their stories as funny and tender as they are brilliantly told.

Ludmila Ulitskaya

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