Featured titles
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Body of the Soul, collected stories by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2019)
Rights sold: Croatia - FRAKTURA, Finland - SILTALA, France - GALLIMARD, Germany - HANSER, Greece - AGRA, Hungary - MAGVETO, Italy - LA NAVE DI TESEO, Serbia - ARHIPELAG, Slovakia - SLOVART, Russia - AST, World English - Yale University Press (Margellos)
Ulitskaya's new collection was subtitled by the author as 'borderline' short stories. In all cultures and religions, the very concept of borderline, of boundary, of some kind of restriction is inherent for one's consciousness and life experience. Over a lifetime, people constantly deal with multiple limitations, internal or external, real or imagined. These boundaries can “expand”, “be effaced”, “crossed”, “demand respect”, some of them we set for ourselves, and others are set by states, societies, or traditions. It is philosophical and humanistic interpretation of this concept that Ulitskaya writes about in her book.
The book feature two cycles of short stories. In the first one, My Lady-Friends, the key motive of Ulitskaya's narrative is love, perhaps the only device capable of effacing any boundaries between people. Protagonists of these stories recover missing part of their soul and gain strength necessary for life with a help of love manifesting itself in different forms and shapes: physical love, maternal love, late love, unexpected love, adoration, allegiance, sympathy, affection...
In the second cycle, On The Body Of The Soul, Ulitskaya approaches the innermost boundary - the boundary of life, or rather of physical existence of our bodies. Is there a line dividing life and death? Or is death the limit of life? And what is there, beyond our physical existence? Ulitskaya's protagonists are caught in those crucial moments of their lives when physical and metaphysical is almost inseparable.
We know much more about human body than about the soul. Indeed, no one can draw up a map of the soul. All we can is just somehow catch, to glimpse into a boundary strip, into that zone separating existence and non-existence. There, near the border as we approach it, such vibrations begin, such subtle details are revealed that it is almost impossible to give them a wording in our beautiful, but limited language. A risky, very dangerous approach. Still, that space attracts to itself the further you live, the stronger. -- Ludmila Ulitskaya
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Only a Miracle Could Save Us: Life and Survival under Stalin's Terror, by Irina Sherbakova (NF)
Rights sold: Germany - CAMPUS
For many years, we knew next to nothing about the private lives of ordinary Soviet citizens during Stalin’s reign. Until very recently, the social history of the Soviet Union written by Soviet and Western historians alike was limited entirely to the public sphere – politics and ideology, and the collective experience of the ‘Soviet masses’. The individual (insofar as he or she appeared at all) featured mainly as a letter-writer to the Soviet authorities (that is, as a public actor rather than a private person or member of a family).
It was only from the end of the 1980s that the practice of oral history – politically impossible in the earlier Soviet period – began to develop in Russia. Public organizations like Memorial, established in the late 1980s to represent the victims of repression and record their history, took the lead, collecting testimonies from survivors of the Gulag. This was an urgent and important task in the glasnost period because these survivors were disappearing fast and because their memories were practically the only source of reliable information about life inside the camps.
Russian journalist and historian Irina Sherbakova of Memorial in Moscow was one of these who interviewed many Gulag survivors…
For her new book Sherbakova has selected the five life stories, five examples of oral history, each in its own way depicting the inhuman policy of Soviet regime during different stages of Stalin’s reign. Among her protagonists are the biologist who was arrested as a ‘wife of an enemy of the people’ and even in prison remained a convinced follower of the Communist ideology; the young Trotskyist who survived through many Gulag prison camps; the son of a German actress who was pursued solely because of his origin; the Red Army officer to whom a single joke about Stalin cost career and freedom… Sherbakova begins a book with the story of her own family, with recollections of her grandfather, who was a Bolshevik and a member of the Comintern and later fell into disfavor.
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Unlike other East European countries, Russia is not striving for a critical appraisal of its Communist past. A dedicated work of Memorial society members, including Irina Sherbakova, is a rare exception. Sherbakova have definitely chosen the only correct method of presentation, because the terror of Stalinism can not be expressed in abstract numbers. Much more impressive is the presentation of an individual biographies, each reflecting the precarious history of the Soviet Union.