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Sincerely yours, Shurik, a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2003)
Grinzane Cavour Literary Award Winner 2008 (Italy)
Novel of the Year Prize (2004, Russia)Rights sold: Bulgaria - FAKEL EKSPRESS, China – POPULAR LITERATURE, Croatia – FRAKTURA, Denmark - GYLDENDAL, Estonia – TANAPAEV, France - GALLIMARD, Germany - HANSER, Hungary – MAGVETO, Italy - FRASSINELLI, Latvia - Zvaigzne ABC, Poland - PHILIP WILSON, Romania – HUMANITAS, Serbia - PAIDEIA, Spain – ANAGRAMA, Spain (catalan language) – QUADERNS CREMA, Taiwan - LOCUS
In Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel “Sincerely yours, Shurik” the plot is simple: a very good, smart, strong-willed Grandmother Elizaveta Ivanovna and her daughter Vera, a very nice, tender, but quite confused mother raise their boy Shurik in an atmosphere of idyllic family love.
The boy becomes a kind man, very helpful and quite responsive to those in need around him. Shurik has grown into a well educated, mature and attractive young man from a good family and appears to display all the right qualities to become a good person and a trusting, accommodating man, a considerate lover; a good match and an excellent specimen for furthering the species.
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In short Shurik has all the makings of an excellent life-partner for any woman and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the people who are most interested in his help are in fact, red-blooded women.
But while Shurik dedicates himself to “gratuitously helping” women at work, in bed and in their everyday lives, he must offset his sensitivities with humbly serving his defenceless mother Vera and come to terms with his own time, irretrievably passing through his fingers.
At eighteen Shurik falls in love and his love is pure and true, but relationships come to sudden and abrupt end. Later Shurik gets a second fatefully ironic chance at love and even in this instance, life seems to mock him without pity; after many years without seeing his first and only “true” love, the mature independent Lilya, she describes him alternatively as “poor Shurik”, “a bit of a saint” and “a complete moron”.
His undeveloped affair with a cheerful French woman, Joel, is also nipped in the bud because of his imposed (or assumed) obligations. Shurik has neither the strength nor the wherewithal to fight for his right to love and be happy as even his own mother treats him as a personal toolkit to repair the flaws all around her. Shurik is relegated to being a secondary character in the theatre that is Vera’s life as well.
At the end of book Shurik is a thirty-something amalgam of disjointed, mismatched bits and pieces, like several balls of multicoloured thread, odds and ends and found objects that are other person’s lives.
“Sincerely yours, Shurik” is a metaphor for the relationship between the sexes because it puts into question the established concept of how the roles of “victim” and “aggressor” are divided between the contemporary male and female. The book represents an analysis of the changing (or more so, the changed but not yet realized) role of woman in modern society.
The story of Shurik Korn is just one more typical example of how a man can squander away the precious time that is life and effort, leading inevitably to a personality that becomes diluted beyond recognition, while others seem to know what their goals are and seem to strive tirelessly to achieve them, at whatever cost.
The style and expressiveness of this book deserve a special mention. Ulitskaya’s novel is written in her characteristic extremely rich, savoury narrative manner, employing the seamlessly harmonious substance of literary reality that is the domain of her characters.
She creates fascinatingly convincing juxtapositions between meticulous attention to small details and trivia, a light, ironic prose to emphasize the novel’s theme as entirely removed from the holistic and philosophical questions that govern the human mind.
“Sincerely yours, Shurik” by Ludmila Ulitskaya is certainly a masterpiece and among the most fascinating prose written in narrative fiction today. An immensely pleasurable and quirky book to read, it is a wellspring for discussion and contemplation.
The author examines and analyses the most common, “basic” notions and concepts (love, compassion, family, among others) from an uncommon and surprising point of view. These notions and concepts are all present in the novel, as they are in the life of the main character, but something’s gone seriously wrong, there’s a fly in the ointment and that fly is Shurik Korn, a topsy-turvy Don Juan; so nice, and so darling, that one doesn’t know whether to embrace him or to strangle him. -
The Freedom Factory, a novel by Ksenia Buksha
Winner of the 2014 National Bestseller Award (Russia)
Winner of the 2014 Città di Penne-Mosca Prize (Italy)Rights sold: Russia - OGI, World English - PHONEME MEDIA
Poet, writer, and journalist Ksenia Buksha was thirty when she published The Freedom Factory, the novel that won Russia's 2014 National Bestseller prize. Buksha, an economist by training, was just eighteen when her writing began earning critical acclaim. She brings both striking innovation and unflinching maturity to her creative work, while her precisely observed narration and dialogue transport readers through the entire spectrum of Soviet and post-Soviet life, from the absurd to the sublime.
The Freedom Factory is the history of a real military plant in Saint Petersburg from the 1950s to the present, told in monologues by its workers, managers, engineers. The Freedom Factory is not exactly a piece of realism: it combines poetry and documentary in unique proportion, conveying to readers the atmosphere of that extremely absurd, harsh yet magnetic place. Sometimes the narrative comes very close to everyday speech, sometimes it falls into lyricism or grotesque humor, but it always remains amazingly sincere. There are life stories and love stories, military secrets and anecdotes, work and leisure. Lots of different voices merge into a chorus; characters are not named, just denoted with Latin letters – but that doesn't prevent us from feeling with them.
“The Freedom Factory is a thriller, a romance, and a social drama all in one, and—this is especially important—it’s a book by a post-Soviet person about the Soviet experience.” – Dmitriy Bykov, literary critic
“My first impression was that of a … novel written by a slightly drunk Joyce.” – Maxim Amelin, Ksenia Buksha's Russian publisher
“[When I read the novel] I thought of Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela and his novel The Hive… which through the blending of many disparate voices gives an image of the time, the characters, the particular atmosphere. The Freedom Factory has echoes of this same device.” – Gennadiy Kalashnikov, literary critic
“Ksenia Buksha has successfully done what no one else, it seems, has been able to do: combine utopia and anti-utopia.” – Nadezhda Sergeyeva, literary critic
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