Join us for a bilingual evening with Russian novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya, the Writer in Residence in Stanford's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.
Ulitskaya is the author of fourteen fiction books, including The Funeral Party, Medea and her Children, Sonechka, The Kukotsky Case, and other works. She has also written three tales for children and six plays staged by a number of theaters in Russia and in Germany.
Ulitskaya was born in 1943 in the Ural Mountains and graduated from Moscow University with a Master's Degree in biology. She worked in the Institute of Genetics as a scientist. Shortly before perestroika (1979/1982) she became Repertory Director and scriptwriter for the Hebrew Theater of Moscow.
She has won the Medici Award (1998, France), the Penne Literary Prize (1998, Italy) and the Giuseppe Acerbi Award (1998, Italy) for Medea; the Booker Prize (2002, Russia) for The Kukotsky Case; the Novel of the Year Prize (2004, Russia) for the novel Sincerely Yours, Shurik; the Best Writer of the Year Ivanushka Prize (2004, Russia); and the Penne Literary Prize (2006, Italy).
Monday, January 28, 2008. 7:00 PM.
Approximate duration of 1.5 hour(s).
http://events.stanford.edu/events/122/12211/
Featured titles
Agnessa, by Mira Yakovenko (NF)
Rights sold: Czech Republic - MARATON, Poland - ZNAK
The recorded oral memories of Agnes Mironova (1903-1982) is a must book for anybody who wants to know what was a personal life like under Stalinism. For the first time ever, Agnes’s notes open the secret door into living rooms and boudoirs of Stalin's "hangmen", top-ranked Soviet secret police officers during the purges of 1930-40ies. However, anyone who reads this book with the intention to better understand the past, will also discover an outstanding female character, a gorgeous bitch, a proud predator, who reveals all truths about herself frankly and without keeping anything back. A life story of this unique woman, so beautiful and repulsive at once, has developed during the most terrible and bloody period of modern history.
She has always shaped her own destiny in line with XIXth-century model of aggressive female personality in search of perfect husband. Her acumen...
Read moreBlue and Red, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1983)
Rights sold: Italy - Edizioni e/o,
Makanin’s view of man’s nature is a pessimistic one, and his depictions of love and harmonious interrelationships lack the power of his descriptions of man’s inhumanity to man (or to beast). He is most at ease describing love linked to violence, as in Blue and Red (Goluhoe i krasnoe) (1983), which describes how two grandmothers battle for the love of their young grandson Kliucharev, who is ‘unused to love’ — a phrase which perhaps could be used to describe many of Makanin’s heroes.The love which Makanin’s heroes advocate is a tough, universal and unselfish love, as typified by the healer Yakushkin with his philosophy of brotherly love in Makanin's previous novel Predlecha (1982). It is love for one’s family and kin, love for one’s people, birthplace, for Russia, love which has a basis in conscience, which interests Makanin, which means that his characters, are seekers...
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