The book My Father's Letters from GULAG by the Memorial Human Rights Society released in Germany by MSB Matthes & Seitz as Ich glaube an unsere Kinder: Briefe von Vätern aus dem Gulag (tr. Christina Links)
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A Gift of Speech, a novel by Yuri Buida
Rights sold: Russia - AST, World Arabic - Ebdaat Alamia
This novel is a family saga talking about a constant conflict of fathers and sons, and their responsibility towards each other.
In his Gift of Speech Buida looks at the Russian history of 20th and 21st centuries through the representatives of the most privileged and educated layer of its society, members of the Soviet aristocracy that came into existence after the Bolshevik revolution. Notwithstanding a fantastic concentration of mysterious and tragic events in the life of the Shkuratov clan, its trajectory follows the ups and downs of their native country: first Soviet Union, later the post-Soviet Russia.
The story is told in the first person by Ilya Schramm, a member of Shkuratov family, who was raised by a single mother until the age of 16, and only then was told that he was in fact an illegitimate son of Boris Shkuratov, a member of Communist elite, a popular TV host and political journalist. From this day on, a new world opens for Ilya, he enters the exotic inner circle of Moscow's Soviet aristocracy. For the following thirty years, all kind of events happen to the members of Shkuratov clan and their close friends, most of which end up tragically.
Ilya Schramm who (not without his father's help) became a successful lawyer specializing in international law, has tried to shun the Shkuratovs during all of his adult life, but his love for Shasha, a lover of his half-brother Didim, binds him to the family. Ilya finds documents showing that his paternal grandfather Vissarion Shkuratov, a top-shot at the NKVD in Stalin’s times, was a sadist and murderer, while his wife Margo, Boris Shkurartov’s mother, was an informer who sent many innocent people to the camps. Although both were repressed during the Stalinist purges, in the late fifties they
returned from the camps, regained their former privileges, and secured the future of their son Boris.
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Under the Green Tent, a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2010)
Rights sold: Brazil - Editora34, Croatia - FRAKTURA, Czech Republic - PASEKA, Estonia – TANAPAEV, Finland - SILTALA, France – GALLIMARD, Germany – HANSER, Greece - KASTANIOTIS, Hungary – MAGVETO, Iran - Houpaa Books, Italy – BOMPIANI, Japan - Shinchosha, Lithuania - JOTEMA, The Netherlands – DE GEUS, Norway – CAPPELEN DAMM, Poland – BAUER-WELTBILD, Romania - Humanitas, Russia - EKSMO, AST, Serbia - ARHIPELAG, Slovakia – SLOVART, Sweden - Ersatz, Turkey - ITHAKI, World English rights - FSG
In the best traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Ulitskaya raises the bar with each successive book, taking on increasingly more demanding artistic and intellectual challenges and becoming a writer for everybody, not only for her own home readership. She moves far beyond the framework of tired cliches about the enigmatic Russian soul, and in place of laboured and portentous questions proffers her own answers.
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Her new novel 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.
‘Imago’ is a term from biological science and, trained as a biologist, Ulitskaya deciphers human personality in genetic and medical terms in all her books. The imago is the phase in the development of an insect which corresponds to its formal adulthood. The insect imago is capable of reproduction and gradually proceeds through life to death. For a human being, however, the civilised and intelligent homo sapiens, there is potentially more to this phase, a phase of maturity, adulthood, responsibility, mental development, self-sacrifice and struggle.
Imago begins with the death of Stalin and his monstrous funeral attended by many millions and fraught with death. At the funeral the crowd in the centre of Moscow trampled one and a half thousand people to death, a fact concealed by the Soviet censorship. The finale of the novel is the death of the great Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky.
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.
Many cave in at the first pressure from the KGB (the unfortunate photographer does so and becomes an informer), but many others resist the oppressive ideological force and rescue both their physical life and, even more importantly, their conscience. The artist, in the footsteps of Tolstoy, leaves the city, where he faces arrest, for the forests and villages and dissolves in the depths of Russia. Alongside the heroes are a great diversity of women, strong or crushed, bitchy or tender, and magnificently witty. Almost all of them are extraordinary people and their actions too are extraordinary. They love their men in their own individual way, frequently helping and saving them, sacrificing themselves in the process without regret.
The life of one KGB general, the father of the main heroine, is amazing. All his life he has loved a woman he himself sent to the Gulag, and who, when she is released from the camps, forgives him and their love continues. Equally amazing is the story of a former prisoner, an intellectual who fled Nazi Germany and was subsequently incarcerated in a Soviet concentration camp. Emerging from prison, he makes a career as a leading Soviet psychiatrist and is instrumental in consigning the post-war dissidents to the lunatic asylum because, in accordance with the clinical classification and his formal examination, they are ‘factually psychologically unstable’.
As always with Ulitskaya, 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.
Imago has a resonance and a reach which extends beyond the bounds of Russian literature. It is about all people of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is about the fact that in contemporary civilisation full maturity is almost never attained, especially if an individual who aspires to spread their wings and fly has some hobble, ideological or government-imposed, leaden and emasculating, weighing them down. Infantilism (or adolescence) is increasingly found in the modern world as a permanent condition, when the main features of a human being are present but have not ripened, have not found full expression. What should follow childhood is accomplished in a deformed manner or not accomplished at all. Adolescent civilisations form, in which people have ceased to mature. In this book Ulitskaya offers an innovative genre, a kind of anti-Bildungsroman, which will undoubtedly provide many people with food for thought and debate.
As always with this author, however, apart from the philosophical and moral charge, there is also emotional depth and wonderful artistry, a unique gift which renders her books accessible in dozens of languages to millions of readers. Only in her writing do we find that armour-piercing irony which enables episodes to pass, often in a single paragraph, from high tragedy to almost Shvejkian comedy. Imago is a very serious and very funny book.