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Tomorrow There Will Be Happiness, edited by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2013, NF)
Rights sol to: Russia - AST, Poland - ŚWIAT KSIĄŻKI
In 2012, Ludmila Ulitskaya launched the major documentary project “After the Great Victory,” for which people who were children between 1945 and 1953 were invited to send in their childhood memories. Work that Ulitskaya selected was published by AST in 2013 in the collection “Tomorrow There Will Be Happiness” with Ulitskaya’s preface and comments.
This book is yet another project in social portraiture by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Its goal is to restore historical memory in Russia, a country burned many times over and still being burned. Ulitskaya chooses the relatively rare genre of folk memoir – the stories and witness accounts of “little people”. Written quite subjectively and without artifice, together they create the magical effect of compound vision, where space and the objects in it are simultaneously seen from all sides. Besides these mini-memoirs, the book also contains eighteen forewords by Lyudmila Ulitskaya and a recollection by the noted writer Alexander Kabakov. All this is framed in a wonderful photo gallery – photos from personal archives.
Voices of different people, men and women, villagers and city folk, meld into a many-voiced choir, into a shared story of how they all grew up together. How they embraced in the glow of the fireworks on May 9, 1945, how they pined for a piece of bread, how they dressed in castoffs, went around in father’s patched army shirts, washed in public baths, played with sticks and stones because there were no toys. The details of postwar life emerge sharp and dimensional, long-lost characters step out onto the stage – the result is a vast canvas of a shared life, utterly poor, soaked with fear, but full of hope for an imminent happiness for all.
Ludmila Ulitskaya says: “The genre of this book is close to a documentary, but not quite: collage gives it a very special quality. This book has a long history. My first stories came out of my childhood memories; they were published as the “Childhood 49” in the early 2000s. In 2012 the book was reprinted. This time it created a lot of interest, many readers responded, and it turned out that people had a need to share their memories of growing up after the war with their grandchildren, who knew little about the life of older generations (and weren’t very interested). So my publisher suggested that I compile a book of the memories of children from that time. We ran a story contest – and got bundles of letters. They were amazingly interesting; with descriptions of a life such as we will never see again, with kerosene lamps, food rations, gangs of street urchins, bread cards, photos with faces cut out, cruel games and generous giving… At first I despaired, because I couldn’t imagine what to do with this mountain of raw material that just kept growing. Then I realized that I needed to find some common themes and use them to organize the telling: “how we ate”, “how we drank”, “how we washed”, “our school”, “our neighborhood”. The frame came completely naturally: the time between two key events – end of World War II and Stalin’s death.”
”This book is bitter medicine. It's hard to swallow whole; you have to take it in little spoonfuls.”-- Maya Kucherskaya, literary critic
“Lyudmila Ulitskaya has brought the eight years after the war as close to us as humanly possible. If you remove the patina of officialdom from the expression ‘portrait of an era’, that’s exactly what it is.” -- Evgeniy Belzharsky, literary critic
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Leningrad, a novel by Igor Vishnevetsky (2010)
Rights sold: World English - Dalkey Archive Press, Italy - Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina (Incroci di Civiltà), Macedonia - BATA PRESS MILLENNIUM, Russia - VREMYA
2011 NOS literary award
2010 "Novyi mir" literary magazine award for the best fiction
Vishnevetsky’s Leningrad is a masterful mixture of prosaic and poetical texts, excerpts from private letters and diaries, quotes from newspapers and NKVD internal documents, in which the author fuses rough documentary with philosophical grotesque and depicts the Siege as a moment of truth for Leningrad artists and white-collars. The story is told through the correspondence and diary entries of the protagonists, the Composer, his lover Vera and Vera’s husband, the naval officer intercepting enemy communications for the Russia’s Baltic Fleet positioned in and in front of Leningrad. The love triangle ends tragically when Vera, pregnant from her lover, decides to leave the besieged city but meets a macabre death, while the Composer at the same time mentally collapses and possibly dies of hunger, unaware of his lover’s fate.
The most inhuman conditions of the Siege, starvation and continuous bombing and shelling make the background to the story. For the first time in modern Russian literature Vishnevetsky brings up the issue of vitality of moral and ethical values cultivated and magnified by Russian intelligentsia, and their ability to confront the cruel reality. In their wild attempts to survive the protagonists hold on to their art, ideas, and sentiments over which neither Bolsheviks, nor Nazis, not even the death itself have power.
Vishnevetsky’s narrative departs into highly experimental and emotionally charged discussion of “ultimate questions” of one’s existence. In this regard his Leningrad closes the gap between present-day Russian letters and the tradition of Russian philosophical novel which existed uninterrupted until the 1940’s.
Russia's stunningly beautiful second city, formerly and now St Petersburg, but known as Leningrad between 1924 and 1991, has had a unique character since Peter the Great built it as his window on the West at the start of the 18th century. As Petrograd (1914-24) it witnessed the Russian Revolutions of 1917. The Siege of Leningrad during WWII is one of the most moving, stirring, and horrific tales of human ingenuity and endurance in history.
The destruction of Leningrad was one of Adolf Hitler's strategic objectives in attacking the Soviet Union. Hitler's plan was to subdue Leningrad through blockade, bombardment, and starvation prior to seizing the city. The Siege of Leningrad was a prolonged military operation. It started on September 8, 1941, when the last land connection to the city was severed. Although the Red Army managed to open a narrow land corridor to the city in 1943, the final lifting of the siege took place only in 1944, 872 days after it began.
The two-and-a-half year siege caused the greatest destruction and the largest loss of life ever known in a modern city. The 872 days of the siege resulted in unparalleled famine in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 civilians and soldiers and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more inhabitants of the city, mainly women and children, many of whom died during evacuation due to starvation and bombardment.
Human losses in Leningrad on both sides exceeded those of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The siege of Leningrad remains the most lethal siege in world history.
Civilians in the city suffered from extreme starvation, especially in winter of 1941–1942. Between November 1941 and February 1942 the only food available to the citizen was 125 grams of bread, of which 50–60% consisted of sawdust and other inedible admixtures, and distributed with ration cards. In conditions of extreme temperatures (down to -30°C) and city transport being out of service, the distance of a few kilometers to work or the food distributing kiosks were insurmountable obstacles for many citizens. People often died on the streets, and citizens shortly became accustomed to the look of death. Reports of cannibalism appeared in the winter of 1941–1942, after all birds and pets were eaten by survivors.
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