WLF Prize 2024 - Lyudmila Ulitskaya

[Bartleby]

This is a space for sharing thoughts on Lyudmila Ulitskaya's works read for our WLF Prize in Literature project.

Lyudmila Ulitskaya on Russia’s Women

The author discusses “Alisa,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.

www.newyorker.com

Lyudmila Ulitskaya Against the State

From 2014: Masha Gessen on the writer’s dissenting voice. As Russia has grown more politically repressive, Ulitskaya’s fiction “has moved in for a confrontation,” she writes.

www.newyorker.com

Feel free to share any links related to her, as well as ideas on where to start reading the author

 

[redhead]

I have a copy of The Big Green Tent out from the library (got it in the days leading up to the Nobel in case she won). Was going to return it, but now I think I’ll give it a read. Has anyone else read it?

 

[Ludus]

I read Sónechka last year and I really liked it, I think it might be a good entry point, cuz it's very short and complex: you can see her playing with the Russian literature tradition and making it her own.

 

[hayden]

I have a copy of The Big Green Tent out from the library (got it in the days leading up to the Nobel in case she won)

Love how much this implies you were planning on selling it.

but now I think I’ll give it a read. Has anyone else read it?

Nope. Think we might have to though. Near everything she's written is a doorstopper, so may as well go with her most popular/acclaimed. I'm also interested in hearing from someone who's read it.


The only thing I've ever read by Ulitskaya is The Funeral Party, which was... fine. I think. I (unfortunately) remember very little about it. Kinda just dipped my toe in the lake. I've never been super enthused about reading her afterwards, but I suppose that might be my fault for starting with a minor work.

For the poll I plan on reading Sonechka + at least one of /) The Big Green Ten /) Medea And Her Children /) The Kukotsky Enigma

I feel my current judgment of her is inadequate.

 

[redhead]

Love how much this implies you were planning on selling it.

Lmao exact opposite of how I meant it to come across. I just wanted one of her books on hand in case she won, and didn’t want to have to deal with waitlists.

 

[Liam]

For what it's worth, my mom, who's a huge fan of Ulitskaya, recommends starting with Medea and Her Children. I haven't read much of her at all, so that's the first book by her I intend to seek out,

 

[Liam]

^I think it's described as "a novel-in-stories", which I find to be a very interesting genre!

 

[The Common Reader]

This is a space for sharing thoughts on Lyudmila Ulitskaya's works read for our WLF Prize in Literature project.

Lyudmila Ulitskaya on Russia’s Women

The author discusses “Alisa,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.

www.newyorker.com

Lyudmila Ulitskaya Against the State

From 2014: Masha Gessen on the writer’s dissenting voice. As Russia has grown more politically repressive, Ulitskaya’s fiction “has moved in for a confrontation,” she writes.

www.newyorker.com

Feel free to share any links related to her, as well as ideas on where to start reading the author

A favorite of mine is her novel, The Big Green Tent. (The title might have been rendered as The Green Pavilion, but that is a quibble.) It follows a group of friends, all members of that particularly Russian social class and state of mind known as the intelligentsia, from the mid 1950's to the mid 1990's: the novel begins in the aftermath of the death of Josef Stalin, and ends with the death of the poet Joseph Brodsky.

It moves from one individual to another and also lurches back and forth in time in a way that seems haphazard, indeed perverse, but that later begins to make sense. For me it feels like a book that helps to explain the people I met there in what was then the Soviet Union in 1985 and later throughout the nineties, it is both intimate and expansive. Ulitskaya’s academic background was in genetics, and she worked for some years as a scientist, and the reader senses that she cares intensely about getting facts straight—how things work, how they look, how abstract ideas (about music theory, or deaf pedagogy) come to life in the experience of the main characters.

The novel has a kind of pointillist detail that builds slowly and has a great cumulative power.

 

[The Common Reader]

Reading The Kukotsky Enigma, I suddenly felt what I think biologists must feel when they come across a living example of a species thought to be extinct. The title character is a Soviet gynecologist whose long life story sweeps across most of the 20th century. It belongs on a shelf with Dr. Zhivago and War and Peace, and indeed one of its main topics is the afterlife of Tolstoyan idealism in the bleak decades following the revolution.

 

[Ben Jackson]

Critics highlights these books for Ulitskaya:

Big Green Tent
Daniel Stein, Interpreter
Medea and Her Children
Kukotsky Enigma
Sonechka

So I think I will read these books. Difficult to find her books, but I will try. She has a new work, a volume of short stories translated, and her recent work is prose work Paper-Notes, published about three years ago.

 

[namelesshere]

I've read The Big Green Tent. It was very good, if a little "baggy".

I've also read The Funeral Party which like Hayden I found to be... fine. A bit dry, didn't especially enjoy it, didn't hate it. I found Just The Plague to be much the same.

I suspect she's better on a bigger canvas. I'd like to try out Jacob's Ladder.

 

[Abhi]

I'm planning on taking up either The Kukotsky Enigma or Daniel Stein, Interpreter as an entry to her writings.

 

[Leseratte]

For what it's worth, my mom, who's a huge fan of Ulitskaya, recommends starting with Medea and Her Children. I haven't read much of her at all, so that's the first book by her I intend to seek out,

It´s just the one I´ve got!

 

[Leseratte]

Sonechka-reading excerpt in PTPT

Sonechka

Sonechka

www.almedina.net

 

[Rodica]

I read Sonechka after The Big Green Tent, although it has that narrative force that I liked in the first book I read, I regret not starting with it. Because now I have the feeling that if I had started with this one I would have postpone reading her novels for a while. Now I am postponing Women's Lies, a short prose anthology written by Ulitskaya consisting of 6 short stories.
What I liked about The Big Green Tent and Jacob's Ladder besides their construction oscillating between the present and the past and the characters who are not few, demanding my attention to follow the thread of events, is the writer's ability with simple writing, from my point of view the characters insufficient explored and yet become memorable by interweaving those stories. I haven't finished a book written by her and immediately felt that it was great, somehow I have to give it some time.

 

[Elie]

I have a copy of The Big Green Tent out from the library (got it in the days leading up to the Nobel in case she won). Was going to return it, but now I think I’ll give it a read. Has anyone else read it?

I've read it and I think it's brilliant. I've also read The Funeral Party and Just The Plague, both of which I liked a lot.

 

[namelesshere]

I haven't finished a book written by her and immediately felt that it was great, somehow I have to give it some time.

This resonated with my feelings about The Big Green Tent - they've improved since I read it.

 

[Chandos MD]

My experience was similar to Hayden's, I was very underwhelmed by The Funeral Party when I read it a few years ago, I imagined there must be something to her other novels for her to have acquired her reputation but haven't been motivated to try again since. My library has Big Green Tent and Jacob's Ladder so that's what I'll go for

 

[nagisa]

Very happy to find that she's widely translated and available in French. Tentatively, I may go with Médée et ses enfants (trusting @Liam 's mother) and Le chapiteau vert (784 pages ?). I may also check out her short stories: she has four collections out in French. Her late ones, Le corps de l'âme, maybe.

Also quite curious about Ce n'était que la peste. It apparently surfaced in 2020 as a piece of Covid literature in Russia, like Camus' La peste, Mann's Death in Venice or Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year did in some circles.

 

[Stevie B]

FYI - The novels Medea and Her Children and The Funeral Party are both available in English on Archive.org. Alas, The Big Green Tent is not currently a borrowing option. It also appears there are some Ulitskaya short stories that are included in several anthologies. There are also a number of Russian books available (though I'm unable to tell you which ones they are).