Apraksin Blues № 15 - The Time of Ulitskaya. James Manteith

Apraksin Blues № 15. 2008 - THE HEART OF THINGS

THE TIME OF ULITSKAYA

James Manteith

Ludmila Ulitskaya

(photo: L. Vodopyanova)

An audience gathers to meet with the writer Ludmila Ulitskaya. Her novel Daniel Stein, Translator, following preceding books published over about ten years, has decisively secured her reputation throughout the globe. Friends discuss Ulitskaya's works with friends, family with family. Some readers whom her earlier work left unmoved find this latest novel brilliant. Others, wishing prominence for an edgier national literature, find Ulitskaya's popularity symptomatic of a new era of heightened social conformity. U.S. book industry commentators, not neglecting to remark on the scale of the publicity campaigns accompanying the novel's release, point to Stein as evidence that the idea of an "intellectual bestseller" remains less contradictory for Russia than for America—where Ulitskaya travels on her current tour, related less to publicity than to humanitarian business. This evening at a private club comes as a brief pause between universities.

Ulitskaya herself appears, a woman in her sixties, deliberately unglamorous, with a certain ironical charm. She acquaints the audience with her biography, ranging from the study of genetics to work as a literary consultant in a Jewish theater. To her listeners, far from impartial, the details appear familiar. The attraction lies in hearing all this from the author. The phases of this well-examined life receive a customary outline. Ulitskaya lingers over a few names—particularly those of pedagogues, as if subtly reinforcing a system of values that accords special meaning to decency and commitment, the heroism of daily existence.

Ulitskaya sharpens her focus on her current theme, that of "tolerance," the surprisingly persistent concern of humanity early in this century, and one also key in the furor over her as a novelist. Not a demagogue, says Ulitskaya, she has found herself in the role due to a tendency, during interviews, to state personal opinions on controversial questions without care for the consequences. That she is often confused with her novel's hero, Stein, a person similarly, although differently, "careless" in his utterances, has only heightened the perception of her scandalousness. This scandal is neither literary nor moral, but idealogical, concerning the place of tolerance in forging a national identity. Ulitskaya does not back away from this aspect of her reputation, but steps into the breach.

The story Ulitskaya reads places her issue openly on the table. Its narrative shows the reverse of tolerance, flat-out intolerance, recalling an episode from the author's childhood, an incident while buying pears in a southern republic of the Soviet Union. During this operation, the seller delivers a spirited rant in the local manner. The author seems to intend this incident, softened with touches of nostalgia and good-natured humor, as a dose of earthy reality, in contrast to the official myth of Soviet national unity. To judge by her listeners' knowing laughter, the story succeeds. Many of those present may recall similar occurrences.

"Does anyone have my books here?" Ulitskaya asks. "I can read some more, and then answer questions." She finds and reads a lengthy passage from Stein, someone's copy now under the author's fingers. Stein, a Catholic priest with untraditional views on doctrine, in the young state of Israel, corresponds with a young woman in Germany who wishes to join his cause. The text creates a sense of intimacy, as if inviting the reader to join a still-relevant, as yet undecided struggle.

The questions begin. Does Ulitskaya, phenomenally popular at this moment, see herself as a "writer of our time"? "I'm writing for myself and sometimes for people I know," she says. "It just happens that this has appealed to many others. I've seen security guards and elevator girls reading my books. My last book had a run of three and a half million—doesn't that say something?.. But this hasn't changed how the writing itself happens. As for being a writer of our time, it's true I write about the present day and about things in my own memory. The earliest period that figures in my work is the 1940s."

The answer eludes the level defined by the question. In this interim meeting, Ulitskaya doesn't hurry to share secrets of her craft. Yet while maintaining a deliberate, scaled-down approach (some discern echoes of Chekhov in her work), she has become known as a sociological phenomenon, even apart from her literary standing—by virtue of popularity alone, as a unifying force, engaging (unlike the vast majority of authors) the good in readers, supporting their hopes, not doubts.

This evening, at least, is free from breaches of tolerance. What else does the phenomenon of Ulitskaya do? It may defuse a certain inner crisis for readers troubled by a sense of an era passing without great authors, without authors capable of mirroring it adequately, an era with tensions sufficient to overwhelm the aesthetic imagination, when ideas have been at odds—born and disappearing, ascending and descending with less objectivity and perhaps less finality than presumed arbiters and commentators may have expected. Ulitskaya makes it her habit to guide life's prose a slight distance up into an artistic form that illuminates experience while leaving experience itself intact. For a while, the priorities of literary development had deemed such ambitions uninteresting, insufficiently courageous. They may be found so again. At times, demonstratively uncommon books—whether fantastic or allegorical, shocking, antisocial—come to the fore as most likely to compensate for the voicelessness that any person, psychologically or actually, may feel challenging his own reality. Bulgakov, Carroll, Orwell, Tolkien, Castaneda, the Strugatskys might be seen to point the way to new perspectives in literature and life. From the camp that pins its hopes on writers like Pelevin and Limonov, with heroes presented as sacrificial standard-bearers for alternative modes of being, Ulitskaya's popularity elicits cries of despair and indignation. Working methodically, sanely, soberly, maintaining a constant temperature, she manages to return life to three dimensions, time's flow to one direction. Writing novels, she says, may be too laborious for her to attempt yet another. She is now involved in a project for children's literature, where she says the standards have slipped. Here, then, is a portrait of life, of time. Journalists confirm it. Genetics, physicists and philosophers at least do not refute it. Irrational theology? Meditative quest? Magic realism? For all that, literature gives other writers, and also gives their antidotes.

Ulitskaya's productions, the work of her thought, have the effect of a healthy balancing, returning from the novelty of artificial flavoring to the memory of real, unadulterated bread. The recipe for making it—whether a heavy loaf or an unleavened wafer—is often ruined, seldom improved. The writer offers an ethical communion, similar to the ecclesiastical rite's: overcoming the solitude of individual existence, healing rifts—in wounded generations, in one's own life, in a separate life with relation to different lives, as a matter of tolerance or simply of sympathy, balancing attentiveness to self with the art of understanding others.

It's possible, then, to come away from this meeting with Ulitskaya with a sense of absolution: forgiven, being ready to forgive. But this is mixed with sadness. The mercy is not divine, although it may comfort.

And yet: what is knowledge, what is achievement, if tolerance renders all equal? What faith should follow cultural medicine?