Notice: your host received a review copy of this book, courtesy of Yale University Press.
This year, I spent Thanksgiving the way Abraham Lincoln had envisioned for Americans when he made it a national holiday in the 1860s: by talking about contemporary Russian literature.
Ludmila Ulitskaya is the first woman to win the Russian Booker Prize. Born in 1943, she studied biology until the early 70s, then made the switch (not such a polarized one, in your host's opinion) to literature and the arts. Her fiction, which she first published at the end of the 80s, grew to rapid notoriety, with film adaptations and a massive translation range. She was born to a Jewish family but converted to Orthodox Christianity.
The story collection, The Body of the Soul, was published in 2019, nine years after her cancer diagnosis, and off the heels of a "controversy" in which the Azerbajani government made her persona non grata. Lest anyone is tempted to think that her criticism of a government backed by the US and Israel in its oppression and displacement of the Armenians would automatically make her pro-Russian, Ulitskaya has been a vocal critic of Putin's aggression toward Ukraine since 2014, and indeed picked up and left her country, moving to Germany.
It is translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This is the first translation of theirs I've read in literally a decade. Their War and Peace is...okay. The dialog reads stiff. Russian classics translator Michael Katz has criticized the couple for adhering too closely to Russia's syntax at the expense of flow. Others have objected to the fact that Pevear's name comes first although Volokhonsky is the one who knows Russian while he just smooths it out.
I've mentioned before that there aren't ratings for the reviews on here, but I couldn't resist giving each story in this album a rating out of five. The average was 2.7. It's very likely that this type of literary fiction isn't exactly for me: not only in the serious concern with Christian introspections a la Marilynne Robinson, but the particular type of narrative of upper middle class people having epiphanies about things. But it wouldn't be fair to say that Ulitskaya's work is based purely on mimesis either. There are dashes of striking imagery, and some graceful reflections on ageing and illness.
Thematically the pieces are quite chilly. In the story “Blessed Are Those Who…” two sisters who had a difficult relationship with their mother come across a piece of writing — a translation from a prayer — after her death, which moves them to finally honor the parent, though she’s now in the grave.
They wept, sitting at the small wooden carpenterʼs table.
“And who held her hand . . . weʼll never know . . .”
“But you know her, she didnʼt need us . . .”
“Now I really donʼt know . . . why on earth she translated
it into Russian . . . Maybe for us . . .”
“Weʼll never know.”
The suggestion to me is that guilt can be a cure for loneliness. How a reader responds to that thought, whether it's repulsive or a comfort, may depend on their own relationship to religion.
It's probably symptomatic that my preferred stories in the collection were the short ones with hairpin turns into a surrealist mode, over the extended "ordinary life" narratives. "Two Together" employs Ulitskaya's anatomical knowledge toward a lyrical description of a couple's lovemaking — you've heard of 'the body without organs,' well this is bodies without skin.
An exception to that trend are pieces that follow long life stories, like "Man in a Mountain Landscape," a mini Künstlerroman about the making of a photographer; and "A Serpentine Road," the last and the best story.
These stories traverse decades of twentieth century history in Russia, from the tail end of the Stalin period up to nearly the present day. So perhaps the most intriguing thing is what these life experiences don’t center themselves on: namely the collapse of soviet social imperialism in the early 90s and the rapid expansion of the NATO bloc in response. From how these characters remember their lives as Russians, you'd think it hardly made any impact in terms of their existing misfortunes — and maybe that's accurate.
If her disgust is directed at the electoral sham of Putin's regime, that makes sense; but the agnosticism towards politics as such, in this situation, seems to obscure Ulitskaya's relationship with Russian literature. Maybe what I actually respond to here is the general bereftness of national-artistic feelings in imperialist societies.
The most vivid example of Uliskaya’s fiction’s relation to politics is in the opening story, “The Dragon and the Phoenix.” As Zarifa, an Azeri woman, is dying of cancer, her relatives are coming, including her brother Said who brings a rug with a tapestry designed by their father. Musia, an Armenian, finally takes in the design with the dragon and phoenix when the carpet is laid over Zarifa’s coffin.
It was not alone, this Dragon; it was locked in deadly and endless combat with a Phoenix. Sharp corners and angles of ornaments were fighting along the red-and-blue edges, and in the enter one could make out a skinny Dragon tied into a ring with a sacred bird. A Phoenix or a Simurgh. This ring was as if a memory frozen forever in a combat from which no one could emerge victorious.
Musia, and the narrator conveying her reflections, don’t get much out of the tapestry other than static nodes of mythology and symbols. They stand in for a “frozen” conflict — a legalistic status to a territorial conflict that has been off and on since the 90s that gets hypostatized to an unchanging mythic space. There is no obligation to decide how it should resolve, choosing to remain in a forced ambiguity.
The passage continues to an even more conservative note of fundamental helplessness when it comes to the lot of a “weak people.”
The sharp points of claws and teeth were woven by the hands of the rugmaker for all eternity, until the colors faded, until the wool decomposed, until time ground into dust the memory of an artist's work, of the opposing forces of nature and myth, of the enmity of weak people — the memory that lives so deeply in the consciousness of tow neighboring peoples, one of which is a sacred dragon, the other a monstrous bird...and the memory is much deeper than in this handmade picture. It is impossible to tell who in it is the warrior, who the sorcerer, who is evil and who is good, because they are bound forever into one immobile and indissoluble ring...
The intermeshed symbols of woven tapestry often convey a given society’s production and social organization with complex artistry. But here Musia dwells on the sheer decay of the material itself, formulated in an opposition between nature and “myth” (rather than history).
Perhaps this is what it means to come to the end of the thread of art in our time.
Speaking of Armenia, check out the beautiful 1969 movie The Color of Pomegranates.