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Having worked in the field of genetics and biochemistry, Ludmila Ulitskaya began her literary career by joining the Jewish drama theatre as a literary consultant. Her first novel “Sonechka” (Сонечка), published in Novy Mir in 1992, was immediately admired, and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize. Her works have been translated into many languages and have been awarded international and Russian literary prizes, including the Russian Booker for “Kukotsky's Case” (2001). |
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Ludmila Ulitskaya |
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Shortlisted for the Rossica Translation Prize, 2007.
"Arch
Tait's English translation faithfully captures
Ulitskaya’s
carefully constructed
colloquial style"
"From one
of the most important living Russian writers comes a collection of
storytelling miracles. The Russian women in Ludmila
Ulitskaya's stories are unlike any you have met before. They
are charming, intelligent, seductive, and strong enough to carry an
entire dysfunctional country on their backs." Author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook 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.
In "Queen
of Spades", Anna, a successful ophthalmological 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. |
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From "Sonechka"
"One of
her most recent protectors, who materialised after she had been sent to
a particularly monstrous skills training centre for orphans and devised
an ingenious plan of escape, was a fat forty-year-old Tatar called Rafil,
a railway carriage steward who conveyed her all the way to the Kazan
station in the city of Moscow, chosen as the starting point for her
meteoric rise. In the side pocket of a checkered shopping bag she had a
passport, made out in her name a short time previously, which she had
stolen from the principal's study, and a very modest twenty-three
pre-reform rubles pinched from the somnolent Rafil as the train was
approaching Orenburg. She had no problem with this stolen money for two
good reasons: first, she really had peeled off very little from a very
thick wad; and second, she felt she had earned every kopek of it in her
four days on the train.
Arch
Tait has also translated
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