Lyudmila Evgenyevna Ulitskaya is one of Russia’s most revered authors. She is the first woman to receive one of Russia’s most prestigious writing awards in 2001, the Russian Booker Prize, and has since received many other awards both nationally and internationally recognizing her work. She is hailed for presenting Russian history with a unique focus on her characters’ lives through their relationships rather than directly focusing on the political situation that they were living in. When not engaged with writing, she is heavily involved in activism and government resistance when the Russian government violates its own or other nations’ citizens’ rights and freedoms. The morals she acts upon can easily be seen in her literary work as well, as she explores topics of sexuality, religious and ethnic tolerance, or simply everyday life while strategically disregarding or critiquing Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Ulitskaya still produces work today while remaining heavily involved in activist pursuits.

Ulitskaya was born during the Soviet Russia era on February 21, 1943, to Jewish parents. Her mother was a biochemist and her father a mechanical engineer. However, she was raised by her grandparents. It is likely her grandparents, specifically her grandfathers, who helped shape her views on the Soviet Union and government rule in general. In an interview about her work and the effect the Soviet regime had on it, Ulitskaya says, “they [her grandfathers] knew the regime for what it was” when speaking against the Soviet Union, resulting in them being put into camps (Ulitskaya 2008). Ulitskaya graduated from Moscow State University in 1960 and became a geneticist. Vigilant against her government, she and her coworkers secretly distributed samizdat, which is the replication and disbursement of books, journals, and other literary works banned by the Soviet Russian government. She and her accomplices were caught by the Committee of State Security of Russia, more commonly known as the KGB, which punished citizens who rebelled against the government. Luckily, the KGB interrogators were lenient in their punishment, and she merely lost her job, which is much better than what happened to most people deemed to be rebelling against the Soviet regime (Powers 2009). As a result of no longer working, she cared for her ailing mother and two sons in the 1970s. In the following decade, she was appointed director for a Jewish drama theatre. It was during this phase she began her writing career as a novelist.

In 1992, Ulitskaya published her first novella, Sonechka, immediately leading to her fame and having her become a frontrunner for the Russian Booker Prize. She would eventually become the first woman to take home this award in 2001 for one of her other works, The Kukotsky Case (2001). This book’s focus on safe abortions done by a doctor in 1930s Soviet Russia era broke a barrier barely brushed upon in Russian literature. In many of her works, instead of focusing on a central character, she writes equidistantly from each characters’ experiences and points of view. It is through the narrative and descriptions of scenes and actions of the characters that readers glimpse into the lives of the characters, rather than reading internal dialogue of the characters or conversations between one another. All of her work focuses on the experiences of individuals during Soviet or post-Soviet Russia with plenty of indirect commentary influenced by her morals. In several of her works, such as Medea and Her Children (1996) and The Kukotsky Case, she captures characters’ lives intergenerationally, allowing her to provide a “historical outlook on that character’s development and present a panoramic view of ancestors and descendants” (Powers 2009). While in all of her works she is critical of Russia’s government, both Soviet and post-Soviet, she insults the state by being “un-Soviet” rather than “anti-Soviet.” In an interview with Anna Rotkirch, Ulitskaya describes her work as having always been “interested in the private person, in his or her ability to survive in society, whereas for me politics has always been an unavoidable evil” (Ulitskaya 2008). In other words, she pays little attention to the government, not even giving it the time of day in her literary works, while still being able to instill her morals and beliefs into the narratives (Gessen 2014). 

As much as she is a well-revered writer, Ulitskaya is also an impressive activist. Not only during her geneticist days did she work alongside others to distribute information banned by the Soviet government but much of her life, especially since the 1990s has been spent critiquing the government and working to help the oppressed. In the early 1990s and 2000s, she began creating small scale charity projects both for Russian citizens and international peoples who suffered by the hands of Russia. During Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014, she spoke harshly against Putin and other Russian leaders; she held similar opinions regarding Stalin’s reign as well. Her outspokenness against Russia’s war on Ukraine led to her and several other activists to be perceived as enemies of the state where negative propaganda was distributed about them (Gessen 2014). It can easily be seen how her morals and activism play into her narratives by comparing her actions to the words she puts on a page. 

Blending her beliefs into the pages of her narratives, she creates themes typically rejected or considered inappropriate by the Russian state. Her works feature forms of sexuality often considered taboo in Russian culture, like that of Sonechka, which features a lesbian romance and sex scene. Across many of her works, she is able to encapsulate characters of different backgrounds, supporting messages of religious and ethnic tolerance (Powers 2009). Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2006), for example, follows a man who lived through the second world war by acting as a gentile, despite his Polish Jewish background and religion. She expressed rebellion in the books by citing his helping of hundreds of jews to escape internment. The themes of freedom and life within her characters’ lives inform the Russian public of an ethos they usually aren’t told by the government (Gessen 2014; Powers 2009). Additionally, her narratives, as well as her personal actions, are critical in the responsibilities of the Russian intelligentsia (a broad term encapsulating educated people who have the power and thus the responsibility to disseminate work misconstrued or rejected by the government). 

Ulitskaya has experienced pieces of history many of us can only imagine, but she shares the plight and courage of those living and affected by Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia in her literary works. She presses the boundaries of Russian taboos in her works, challenging many of her readers to see a different perspective rather than the one enforced by the state. An interview with Hungarian Literature Online perfectly illustrates Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s goals in both her written words and lived actions: “That we should always do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us. That's acting with conscience, and it's our only means of survival. This is the point of view from which I write” (Vari 2009). 

Bibliography

Gessen, Masha  “Lyudmila Ulitskaya Against the State.” The New Yorker, 6 Oct. 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/weight-words. 

Powers, Jenne. "Liudmila Ulitskaia." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 27 February 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on September 21, 2020) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ulitskaia-liudmila-e>.

Ulitskaya, L. (2020). Ludmila Ulitskaya. In J. Stock (Ed.), Contemporary Literary Criticism (Vol. 454). Gale. (Reprinted from Contemporary Russian Fiction, pp. 174-192, by A. Ljunggren & A. Rotkirch, Eds., 2008, GLAS) https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1100127390/LitRC?u=swar94187&sid=LitRC&xid=65bdcadd

Vári, Erzsébet. “Conscience Is Our Only Means of Survival.” Hlo.hu, 5 May 2009, hlo.hu/interview/conscience_is_our_only_means_of_survival.html.