French theatrical company LA COMPAGNIE DES MOTS MIGRATEURS presents a performance for children UNE VICTOIRE EN PAPIER based on Ulitskaya's works - February 2009
Featured titles
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Kukotsky Case, a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2001)
Penne Prize (2006, Italy)
Russian Booker Prize 2001Right sold to: Albania - OMSCA, Bulgaria - COLIBRI, China - LIJIANG PUBLISHING, Beijing October Art & Literature Publishing House, Czech Repuiblic - PASEKA, Denmark - HOVEDLAND OG BOGAN, Estonia - TANAPAEV, France - GALLIMARD, Georgia - AZRI, Germany - VOLK UND WELT (LUCHTENHAND LUEBBE), Japan - GUNZOSHA, Korea - DULNYOUK PUBLISHING, The Netherlands - DE GEUS, Hungary - EUROPE, Italy - FRASSINELLI, Lithuania - JOTEMA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Norway - BAZAR, Poland - PHILIP WILSON, Portugal - RELÓGIO D’ÁGUA, Romania - HUMANITAS FICTION, Russia - EKSMO, AST, Serbia - Filip Višnjić, ARHIPELAG, USA - Northwestern University Press
Big part of her life Ulitskaya has been closely connected to biological schience, though a twist of life took her in another direction. Her years devoted to studying genetics and medicine have made a considerable impact on her literary style. This was where she realized the similarities between the doctor and the priest, and this was where the difficult questions emerged: where do the limits of human freedom lie and what are the limits between health and sickness, between life and death?
The novel Kukotsky Case deals with important themes such as motherhood, illness and marriage. The hero, a gynecologist, is ready to do everything possible to protect yet unborn life, but he also feels it his duty to defend every woman’s right to abortion, thus saving thousands of women from death as a result of backstreet abortions. This was a burning issue in the mid-twentieth century and it remains just as relevant today in the new millennium.
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The Night We Disappeared, a novel by Nikolai Kononov
Rights sold: Russia - INDIVIDUUM
This is a polyphonic novel ambitious both in terms of its literary quality and the issues it discusses: xenophobia, inequality, post-memory, the "right turn," and anarchy. It is, of course, also a book about a search for identity, both among individuals and within the territories of Eastern Europe, where inhabitants suffered over and over during social upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. The novel is centered on a phenomenon of apatrides - people rejected by their homeland who - against their will - became citizens of the world.
The plot-lines of the three main characters in Kononov’s novel are all set between 1919 and 1951. All three are refugees from the Russian and Soviet empires: they are exiles, stateless persons. Even so, history gave each a chance to play their own role in history before, during, and after World War II. Their trauma and pain affect their descendants – our contemporaries – in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
A young woman – a teacher who was raised by a dedicated Marxist mother in the USSR in the 1930s – suddenly converts to Christianity while surviving the Nazi occupation in the city of Pskov during WWII. She later witnesses a lesbian relationship developing between two young schoolgirls in a refugee camp. A White Russian émigré pretends to be a Bolshevik spy, deceives the German military-intelligence service, then falls in love with an anarchist woman and tries to turn the theory of love’s powerlessness into reality. A German refugee suffers from a dissociative identity disorder because he is unable to cope with the fact that he had betrayed his parents while saving his own life.
The circumstances of the lives of these three characters are told in letters, diaries, and documents discovered by our contemporaries: one of them is a high school girl who openly expresses an outrage against the war in Ukraine, another is a student working on her dissertation on the history of anarchism in a London apartment, the third is a German who was recently released from prison after serving a sentence for committing murder in the heat of passion.
The Night We Disappeared is about an individual’s bewilderment when facing a changing world and its uncontrollable brute forces. It’s about the utter fiasco of existing social structures, and the urgent need for new forms and ways of social interaction.
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