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Showing 1 - 8 of
8 matches in All Departments
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Just the Plague (Paperback)
Polly Gannon; Ludmila Ulitskaya
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R256
R243
Discovery Miles 2 430
Save R13 (5%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Rudolf Maier, a young microbiologist working on a plague vaccine,
is summoned to Moscow to deliver a progress report to his
superiors. Inadvertently, he carries the virus with him from the
lab. When his illness is discovered, the state machinery turns with
terrifying efficiency, rounding up dozens of people. But for many,
the distinction between this enforced, life-sparing isolation and
the constant churn of political surveillance and arrests is barely
detectable, and personal tragedy is not completely averted. Based
on real events in the Stalinist Russia of the 1930s, this gripping
novel, written in the late 1980s and rediscovered by the author
during lockdown - and never before translated into English -
surfaces uncomfortable truths about the current Russian regime and
the pandemic crisis. Includes a new afterord by the author.
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The Body of the Soul - Stories
Ludmila Ulitskaya; Translated by Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
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R468
R373
Discovery Miles 3 730
Save R95 (20%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A new collection of stories by the acclaimed Ludmila Ulitskaya,
masterfully translated into English “[A] magnificent
collection . . . [by] a writer of boundless
tenderness.”—Geneviève Brisac, Le Monde While we can
feel, know, and study the body, the soul refuses definition. Where
does it begin and end? What does the soul have to do with love?
Does it exist at all, and if so, does it outlast the body? Or are
the soul and body really one and the same? These are
questions posed by the characters who inhabit this book of stories
by the award-winning Russian writer Ludmila Ulitskaya. A woman
believes that the best way to control her life is to control her
death. A landscape photographer wonders if the beauty he has
witnessed can triumph over decay. A coroner dedicated to science is
confronted by a startling physical anomaly, a lonely widow
experiences an extraordinary transformation, a woman whose life is
devoted to language finds words slipping away from her. In
these eleven stories, artfully rendered into English by Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Ulitskaya maps the edges of our
lives, tracing a delicate geography of the soul.
One of Russia's most renowned literary figures and a Man Booker
International Prize nominee, Ludmila Ulitskaya presents what may be
her final novel. Jacob's Ladder is a family saga spanning a century
of recent Russian history - and represents the summation of the
author's career, which has been devoted to sharing the absurd and
tragic tales of twentieth-century life in her nation. Spanning the
seeming promise of the prerevolutionary years, to the dark
Stalinist era, to the corruption and confusion of the present day,
Jacob's Ladder is a pageant of romance, betrayal, and memory. With
a scale worthy of Tolstoy, it asks how much control any of us have
over our lives - and how much is in fact determined by history, by
chance, or indeed by the genes passed down by the generations that
have preceded us into the world.
The Big Green Tent is the kind of book for which the term "Russian
novel" was invented. A sweeping saga, it tells the story of three
school friends who meet in 1950s Moscow and go on to embody the
heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident
experience. These three boys - an orphaned poet; a gifted, fragile
pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting
secrets - struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their
heroes have been censored and exiled. Rich with love stories,
intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent
offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic
investigation into the prospects for integrity in a society defined
by the KGB. Each of the central characters seeks to transcend an
oppressive regime through art, a love of Russian literature, and
activism. And each of them ends up face-to-face with a secret
police that is highly skilled at fomenting paranoia, division, and
self-betrayal. Ludmila Ulitskaya's big, yet intimate novel belongs
to the tradition of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: a work of
politics, love, and belief that is a revelation of life in dark
times. Named a must-read book by New York magazine, Travel Leisure,
Flavor wire, and Bustle, and a Best Fiction Book of the Year by The
Christian Science Monitor
Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez is an iconic figure in her Crimean
village, the last remaining pure-blooded Greek in a family that has
lived on that coast for centuries. Childless Medea is the
touchstone of a large family, which gathers each spring and summer
at her home. There are her nieces (sexy Nike and shy Masha), her
nephew Georgii (who shares Medea's devotion to the Crimea), and
their friends. In this single summer, the languor of love will
permeate the Crimean air, hearts will be broken, and old memories
will float to consciousness, allowing us to experience not only the
shifting currents of erotic attraction and competition, but also
the dramatic saga of this family amid the forces of dislocation,
war, and upheaval of twentieth-century Russian life.
'Dazzling . . . [An] engrossing study of a vivacious personality
slipping away' THE TIMES 'Rich in detail, elusive in meaning, light
in touch' MOSCOW TIMES In a small apartment in New York, in the
sweltering mid-summer heat, a group of Russian emigres gather
around the sickbed of an artist named Alik. Nina, his wife, is
desperate for Alik to be baptised; Irina, his ex-lover, a circus
acrobat turned lawyer, quietly pays the bills; elderly Maria
dispenses magical herbs; and Maika, Irina's fifteen-year-old
daughter, prepares to lose the only man to make her laugh. As the
visitors fuss and reminisce over Alik, in a corner of the crowded
room the television shows the uprising outside the White House in
Moscow and the tanks closing in on the city . . .
August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian migrs gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN?
This marvelous group of individuals inhabits the first novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya to be published in English, a book that was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and has been praised wherever translated editions have appeared. Simultaneously funny and sad, lyrical in its Russian sorrow and devastatingly keen in its observation of character, The Funeral Party introduces to our shores a wonderful writer who captures, wryly and tenderly, our complex thoughts and emotions confronting life and death, love and loss, homeland and exile.
The central character in Ludmila Ulitskaya’s celebrated novel The
Kukotsky Enigma is a gynecologist contending with Stalin’s
prohibition of abortions in 1936. But, in the tradition of
Russia’s great family novels, the story encompasses the history
of two families and unfolds in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the
ruins of ancient civilizations on the Black Sea. Their lives raise
profound questions about family heritage and genetics, nurture and
nature, and life and death. In his struggle to maintain his
professional integrity and to keep his work from dividing his
family, Kukotsky confronts the moral complexity of reproductive
science. Winner of the 2001 Russian Booker Prize and the basis for
a blockbuster television miniseries, The Kukotsky Enigma is an
engrossing, searching novel by one of contemporary literature’s
most brilliant writers.
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