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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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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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