ELKOST International literary agency - At 22-23.10.07 Mrs. Ulitskaya herself will visit Norway capital, Oslo. There are press meeting, interviews and public lecture on her schedule.

“Medea” by Lyudmila Ulitskaya will be represented to Norwegian public in September 2007 simultaneously by two publishers, “Bazar” and “Knowledge&Culture” book club. It is already announced that the novel will become a BOOK OF THE MONTH in Norway.

Featured titles

LEAD ME, BLIND MAN, a novel by Vladislav Otroshenko (2007)

Rights sold: Russia – Culturnaya Revolutzia, AST

A biopic novel dedicated to the famous Russian playwright Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903). A rich aristocrat who often travelled, Sukhovo-Kobylin was arrested, prosecuted and tried for seven years in Russia for the murder of his French mistress Louise-Simone Dimanche, a crime of which he is nowadays generally believed to have been innocent. Based on his personal experiences, Sukhovo-Kobylin wrote a trilogy of satirical plays about the prevalence of bribery and other corrupt practices in the Russian judicial system of the time.

Russian Marmalade, collected plays by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2005)

Rights sold: France - GALLIMARD, Germany - HENSCHEL, Russia - EKSMO, AST

Collection of plays for theater ("Russian Marmalade", "My Grandson Benjamin", and "The Seven Saints from Bruho Village").

Russian Marmalade is a play clearly created in dialogue with Anton Chekhov’s «Cherry Orchard». The play’s heroes live in the same kind of old house with the same cherry trees growing all around, only the cherries themselves get made into jam to be sold to provide the owners of the home with their sole means of survival. It is the end of the twentieth century and Russia has changed course yet again as the old system crumbles.

None of the doors close and the electricity does not always work, but mobile phones are busy ringing all the time. The sentimental Chekhovian girl in this play, it turns out, works round the clock for an erotic phone line, unsuspected, it seems, by her respectable parents. This time it is not old monarchist Russia that is crumbling, but the Soviet regime as it gives way to the Yeltsin years. The “new Russians” sell and resell their parents’ dacha, and the parents, pushed onto the sidelines of life, don’t know where to turn anymore. These unhappy tales are infused with philosophical dread and deep psychological analysis. Ulitskaya tells her tales as only she knows how – in a comic, almost grotesque tone, turning a melancholy play with a Chekhovian plot into a bright and buoyant comedy.