The look with which the author looks at his characters is the most significant value of Ulitskaya’s new book, this historical novel in short stories.
1. Gracious glance. The look with which the author looks at his characters is the most significant value of Ulitskaya’s new book, this historical novel in short stories. And the main characters – three comrades, the future professional dissident Ilya, the poet Mikha, the music theorist Sanya, whose childhood and youth fell on the post-war years, and the non-main characters – their wives, fathers, grandmothers – everyone is understood and accepted here. The general who sent his beloved to the camps and his wife, who renounced her priest-father, the dissident hunter Ilya and the latent homosexual Sanya. The altruist Mikha, who stepped out of life’s trials through the window, and his wife, who is not well-behaved, closed in on herself – everyone in this book is forgiven.
2. Adulthood. In foreign editions, the novel will be called “Imago”, such is the author’s will. An imago in biologists is an “immature” individual, for example, an insect that is already capable of reproduction, but instead of pupae, it gives rise to larvae that never grow into full-fledged individuals. The second key theme in the novel after forgiveness is the question of growing up, that most of us freeze at the imago stage, not having the strength and will to realize the idea of ourselves to the end.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya is one of the most famous Russian writers in the world. Winner of many literary awards, from the “Russian Booker” (2001) to the Italian “Grinzane Cavour” (2008).
3. History. This novel is also important to read for those who vaguely imagine how Stalin’s funeral took place, the World Youth Festival of 1958, why in August 1968 several people went to Red Square to protest, and are ready to think together with Lyudmila Ulitskaya about the place of these events in our recent history.
EKSMO, 592 p.