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| Liudmila Ulitskaya |
BOOKS AND WRITERS
Ludmila Ulitskaya
Ludmila Ulitskaya was born in 1943 in the Urals, graduated from Moscow University with a Degree of Master in Biology. She worked in the Institute of Genetics as a scientist. Shortly before Perestroika she became a repertory director of the Hebrew Theatre of Moscow (1979-1982), and a scriptwriter.
Ludmila Ulitskaya can be defined as one of the most profound and far-reaching writers of the contemporary Russian literature. She made her first appearance on the literary stage in 1990ies, when she published several collections of short stories full of rich colour and psychological details. Nowadays Ulitskaya is the author of fourteen fiction books (over 4 000 000 copies sold worldwide), of three tales for children, and of six plays staged by a number of theatres in Russia and in Germany. Many of her books are immediately translated abroad.
Ulitskaya’s first novel "Sonechka" (1995), a true gem of modern Russian woman’s narrative, won a prestigious Médicis literary prize in 1996.
"Medea and her children" (1996) was Ulitskaya’s first full-length novel. Here Ulitskaya passes towards the narration of big epochal changes and the narration becomes a saga about a life of family of Crimean citizens in three generations. This is a format that will characterize the whole further output of the writer comprising her latest production. The plot is rich with characters of different nationalities and extraction, all the secondary characters are written with microscopic wealth of detail, indicative of typical generosity of the writer. Every character is sculptured to a degree that most writers reserve only to their protagonists. Thus the reading becomes unique and unforgettable experience.
"Funeral Party", a novel published in 1997, is Ulitskaya’s universally acknowledged masterpiece focused on the crucial point of every human being: on death. The plot is centred on the life of a Russian émigré painter in New York in the beginning of the 1990ies. The novel combines a sad Jewish humour with rare capacity to unflinchingly gaze at the biggest problem of all, so often and so easily repressed by a man from the street. This gift of writing about the main questions of life places Ulitskaya into a more than centenary Russian tradition of vital writing as an heiress of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky.
Her next novel "Kukotsky Case" (2001) on one hand continues a epoch-sweeping and saga-broad adventure that started with Medea, but on the other hand, for the first time enters the domain of altered states of the human consciousness focusing on the mechanisms of human memory and its mystery. One of the protagonists is an Alzheimer patient, a woman who continues to live both in the ordinary space-and-time dimension and in the state of altered consciousness where past, present and future are present in one eternal now and here. Reality and bardo state mingle in her mind and create an intriguing counterpoint between the actual plot full of very lively characters and action and its inner windy desert counterpart evolving the brain of the woman. The novel covers four decades and several epochs of Soviet and new Russian history ploughing through various strata of human mind, delving deep into subconscious. Surely it is one of the most rewarding and multilayered novels to appear in modern Russian literature.
The novel "Women’s Lies" (2002) consists of eight chapters, each with its own separate plot, where the main theme is the invention, creativeness or mythomaniac syndrome, an acute analysis of what makes human imagination work, a writer insight into the mechanisms that stand at the basis of her own work almost to seem a scholarly essay disguised as lively and highly readable collection of short chapters.
Ulitskaya’s "Sincerely yours, Shurik" published in 2004 was her first novel completely dedicated to the theme of love in human relations. The central figure is a modern Casanova in disguise of a handsome Muscovite with a possessive widowed mother and an unassuming profession of an interpreter. Ulitskaya creates an character of eternally womanising modern male who by his own indecision finally ruins his life, because – the irony of the sort – the only woman he really cares for is unable to take him seriously, mistaking his gentleness for insipidity and lack of character.
"All Our Lord’s Men" (2005) is a collection of maxims and parabolas, sketches and legends encompassing all the main themes of the start of the new millennium. The book has been very highly received by readers looking for wise and profound interlocutor in the author’s voice. Readers have always been drawn to Chamford and Larochefoucauld for these same reasons, but whereas it is the moral of the story that is the primary focus of these authors’ works, Ulitskaya gives pride of place to the plot. Her subjects are life and death, aggression, endurance of pain and the happy or unhappy twists of fortune that determine the course of fate. Ulitskaya knows how to tell a story, spinning small details into events of gigantic proportions and showing that nothing in this life is unimportant.
Her next novel "Daniel Stein, Interpreter" (2006) is at the same time a skilfully crafted literary roman epistolaire, a philosophical tale, a profound historical survey and an entertaining peace of fiction. It covers wide geographical areas – Germany, Israel, USA, Russia – and dramatic historical epochs - from second World War in Warsaw to modern Israel. It enters into deep historical detail: tragedy of Holocaust, the rise and fall of Communist doctrine and which is more important it gives a new reading to the role of Christianity. Far from being commonplace this novel breaks new ground and ventures boldly into a new literary spaces pulling down many established “rules” of literary form. The book is construed as a patchwork of private histories recounted through letters of her characters, personal diaries, taped conversations and a liberal supply of official notes, interrogation reports, documents and quotations from letters of formal complaints to the authorities. The element that links all of theses sources, the core of this polyhedral narrative crystal, is the story of Daniel Stein, who himself possesses the very gift of bundling other people’s lives. The character of Daniel Stein is based on life of Oswald Rufeisen, the real Brother Daniel, a Carmelite Monk who lived at Stella Maris monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa, and died in Israel in 1998.
Ulitskaya’s last masterpiece "Imago" (2010) can justly claim a place in the first rank of an international hierarchy of major works which form the ideas through which their age is understood. It begins with the death of Stalin in 1953. The finale of the novel is the death of the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in 1996. The heroes of Imago are three friends who come together in solidarity during their school years and live their entire lives side by side. Three small boys develop in a Moscow school under the watchful eye of a gifted teacher. An embryonic talented musician, gifted photographer, and poet of genius are readied for complete self-realisation. They are surrounded by an intelligentsia which consists not only of outstanding and brilliant but also of broken, dependent and intimidated people. The system oppresses all of them, the tough-minded and those who are pathetically weak.
Imago is a novel about love, about destinies, and about characters. It is authentic psychological prose, but her new work is also broader than these definitions. Ultimately this is a novel about failure to grow to maturity, failure to emerge fully from the cocoon, about people of the late 20th century living on the dynamism of adolescence but often, stuck in the phase of the run-up, never actually managing to take wing. Only a very few do attain the heights of which a human being is capable and which is most often achieved as the result of a magical indomitability, or through the agency of a creative profession, or the power of love.
Awards
FRANCE
Prix Simone de Beauvoir pour la liberté des femmes (2011)
Ordre des Arts et Lettres (2004)
Ordre des Palmes académiques (2003)
Médicis Prize (1996, for "Sonechka")
ITALY
Gran Premio delle Lettrici ELLE (Nov. 2010, for Daniel Stein, Interpreter);
Premio Bauer/Ca’Foscari (2010)
Grinzane Cavour Literary Award (2008, for "Sincerely Yours, Shurik")
Penne Prize (2006, for "Kukotsky Case")
Literature Prize Giuseppe Acerbi (1998, for "Sonechka")
Penne Prize (1997)
UK
Man Booker International Prize nominee (2009).
GERMANY
Father Alexander Men's Award (2008, Germany-Russia, for "Daniel Stein, Interpreter")
HUNGARY
Budapest Grand Prix (2009)
CHINA
National Literature Prize (2005, for "Sincerely yours, Shurik")
RUSSIA
Russian Booker of the Decade nominee (2011, for Daniel Stein, Interpreter),
Oleg Tabakov Prize (2011, Russia, for "Imago");
GLOBE yearly prize of The Znamya monthly literature magazine (2010, together with Mikhail Khodorkovsky for 'Dialogues with Ludmila Ulitskaya')
National Literary Prize BIG BOOK (2007, for "Daniel Stein, Interpreter")
Best Stage Play Award 2006 conferred by Moscow Culture Committee(2007, for "The White Elephant Year")
National Olympia Prize of Russian Academy of Business (2007)
Best writer of the Year Ivanushka Prize (2004)
Novel of the Year Prize (2004, for "Sincerely yours, Shurik")
Russian Booker Prize (2002, for "Kukotsky Case")
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