Ludmila Ulitskaya - Jacob's Ladder and other works (7 books)

LYUDMILA ULITSKAYA (b. 1943) is an internationally acclaimed Russian novelist and public intellectual who, in 2014, was awarded the prestigious Austrian State Prize for European Literature for her oeuvre.

Ulitskaya's fiction seemingly describes and observes her characters at an equal distance from each one. Rather than going in for character development or delving into the tortured workings of her characters' psyches otherwise perceived as the hallmark of Russian writing, Ulitskaya favors capsule descriptions, though she acknowledges that her characters are tortured. Generally speaking, she makes little use of dialogue. Among her interlinked themes are: the need for religious and ethnic tolerance; the problem of the intelligentsia in Soviet culture; how women shape new gender roles in society; and everyday life as a literary subject.

Ulitskaya's first novella, SONECHKA (1992), became extremely popular almost immediately and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Award. THE KUKOTSKY ENIGMA (2001), which offers a new reading of Stalinism through the lens of family life and the female body, won the Russian Booker. DANIEL STEIN, INTERPRETER (2006), a novel dealing with the Holocaust and the need for reconciliation between the three Abrahamic faiths, is based on the true story of Oswald Rufeisen and was also shortlisted for the Russian Booker. (Ulitskaya herself belongs to a group of people who see themselves ethnically and culturally as Jews, while having adopted Christianity as their religion.)

THE BIG GREEN TENT (2010) is a massive, swirling epic, stretching across half a century and chronicles the lives and adventures of three artistic childhood friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. JACOB’S LADDER (2015) is a family saga spanning a century of recent Russian history—and represents the summation of the author’s career, devoted to sharing the absurd and tragic tales of twentieth-century life in her nation. Spanning the seeming promise of the prer-evolutionary years, to the dark Stalinist era, to the corruption and confusion of the present day, the novel is a pageant of romance, betrayal, and memory.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:

== FICTION ==

* Big Green Tent, The (FSG, 2015). Polly Gannon, trans.
* Daniel Stein, Interpreter (Overlook, 2011). Arch Tait, trans.
* "Fugitive, The" (New Yorker, 12 May 2014). Bela Shayevich, trans. -- PDF
* Funeral Party, The (Schocken, 2002). Cathy Porter, trans.
* Jacob's Ladder (FSG, 2019). Polly Gannon, trans.
* Kukotsky Enigma, The (Northwestern, 2016). Diane Nemec Ignashev, trans.
* Medea and Her Children (Schocken, 2002). Arch Tait, trans.
* Sonechka: A Novella and Stories (Schocken, 2005). Arch Tait, trans.

== NON-FICTION ==

* "Reading as a Heroic Feat" (Russian Journal of Communication, 2018) -- PDF

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