Review by New York Times Review
LUDMILA ULITSKAYA'S LATEST novel, "The Big Green Tent," is as grand, solid and impressively all-encompassing as its title implies. Yet the fact that it covers the Soviet dissident movement with such force shouldn't be surprising. After all, Ulitskaya has an intimate knowledge of the subject. One of 21st-century Russia's most prominent writers, she was among the dissidents of the Soviet era and she opposes Vladimir Putin now. Ulitskaya's novel, ably translated by Polly Gannon, takes us back to the 1950s, to the beginnings of the postwar dissident movement, which reached its peak in the late 1960s and 1970s and met its natural demise in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The goals of those who participated in it were wildly diverse. As Ulitskaya explains: "Some were for justice, but against the Motherland; others were against the authorities, but for Communism; others wanted true Christianity; still others were nationalists who dreamed of independence for their Lithuania or their western Ukraine; then there were the Jews, who wanted only one thing - to leave the country." While the dissidents did organize some public actions, much of their work was, of necessity, conducted underground. Small groups among the Russian intelligentsia smuggled important manuscripts to the West, encouraged the proliferation of samizdat copies of prohibited books and tried to raise a general awareness of government oppression. Those who ran afoul of the authorities could be sent to prison or to labor camps, forced into exile or committed to psychiatric institutions. Some members of the opposition were truly devoted to the cause, while others were less heroic, taking risks simply to escape the blandness of Soviet society. In a single sentence, Ulitskaya perfectly captures the joy, misery and danger of dissident life: "Tea and vodka poured out in rivers, kitchens basked in the fervent steam of political dispute, so that the dampness crept up the walls to the hidden microphones behind the tiles at the level of the ceiling." She also shows how much painstaking dedication was involved in the samizdat process. Access to copying machines was restricted and there was no digital photography, so the texts were often typed on leaves of thin onionskin interspersed with carbon paper, producing at most about 20 copies at a time. Imagine how long it would take to reproduce the entire manuscript of "The Gulag Archipelago" in order to make a mere 20 copies. Then imagine being arrested because the K.G.B. found part of Solzhenitsyn's text in your apartment. Clearly, the Soviet dissidents believed fervently in the power of the written word. Ulitskaya's novel does much to explain how this came to be. In its structure, "The Big Green Tent" resembles a tree: After a brief prologue, six straightforward chapters form a trunk, and the rest of the novel branches out in different directions. The "trunk" describes the formative years of the central characters, three best friends named Ilya, Mikha and Sanya. Despite their different backgrounds, the boys are drawn together by their intellectual curiosity and, even more important, by their inability to fit in. Mikha is poetic, "bespectacled, and a Jew, to boot." Sanya is too refined - when a school bully pushes a dirty floor rag into his face, he loses consciousness. And Ilya is simply too big in every sense: big height, big personality, bigger penis. When 13-year-old Ilya comes to Sanya's apartment, filthy and bruised after surviving the hellish crush at Stalin's funeral, he collapses into a bath and Sanya, also 13, notices his friend's "large male member, which was not made just for peeing." Even Sanya's grandmother is impressed "that this skinny boy, with a completely boyish face, was already so well equipped for manhood." What can provide an outlet for the boys' larger-than-life qualities as they grow up in such a repressive society? An enthusiastic young teacher shows them how to channel their passions into literature. And so books serve as a bridge between the coming-of-age section and the rest of Ulitskaya's novel. Chapter 6 ends with the boys' first exposure to illicit reading material, including Orwell's "1984." Here the straightforward narrative ends, and Ulitskaya starts to follow different branches of the tree in seemingly random fashion, leaping from one character to another, from one location to another, from the past to the future and back again. Yet despite this structural complexity, Ulitskaya doesn't make her characters similarly complex; they're so easy to grasp they can seem almost transparent. "The Big Green Tent" is all about telling a story or, rather, telling stories - stories and more stories. Most of them are passed along in the chatty manner of casual gossip: "Did you hear about so and so?" We hear about Ilya and his wife, Olga, their friends, their bizarre family histories, their tumultuous love, the intricacies of their work for the dissident movement - Ilya has a vital role, Olga (like most of the women in the novel) is more of a helper. We hear about saintly Mikha, who becomes a true martyr in the fight for the common good, and about dreamy Sanya, who finds refuge in the world of music. There are also striking vignettes about people who have little or no connection to the three main characters. Thus we hear about a naïve psychiatrist who is pressured into committing a dissident general to an institution, even though the only "abnormality" he displays is his outrage over the Soviet government's actions. We hear about a radical artist, hiding from the K.G.B. in a remote village, who happens to watch three very old women as they're bathing. Suddenly inspired by this sight ("He grimaced, but still couldn't tear his eyes away from these three crone-like graces"), he makes many drawings of them and sends some to the West, only to be caught by the authorities and charged with pornography. We hear about a woman who presides over the wedding of her impotent ex-husband and her own sister, then transports a microfilm of "The Gulag Archipelago" to the West. Guess where she hides it. Some of these stories are meant to be familiar to a Russian reader, and in fact many are based on real events, just as many of the characters are based on real people. Some are thinly veiled historical figures, others are more thickly camouflaged; others are purely fictional. All of this creates an eerie landscape, as if the dead were walking among the living. One thing all these characters have in common is that each will arrive at a fork in the road, forced to make a hard choice. But unlike Ts'ui Pen in Borges's story "The Garden of Forking Paths," Ulitskaya won't allow her characters to follow a fork in both directions. One of her chapters is titled "The Road With One End," and that's what her characters get. If you choose to collaborate with the K.G.B., you have to live with that decision for the rest of your life; there's no alternative universe in which you didn't betray your friends. But if you choose not to collaborate, the authorities will set out to destroy you, and there's no alternative universe in which you may hide. Ulitskaya's readers will find it hard not to imagine themselves in her characters' place, to ponder what choices we'd make in similar situations. "Conscience militates against survival," one of the characters remarks. You can't help wondering which you would choose. Ulitskaya captures the joy, misery and danger of dissident life in the Soviet Union. LARA VAPNYAR is the author of two novels, "The Scent of Pine" and "Memoirs of a Muse."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 29, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This sprawling novel offers a wide-angle view of life among intellectual urbanites in the Soviet Union, from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the 1970s and beyond. Three young men meet as Moscow schoolboys and, under the influence of a charismatic teacher, form a group called the LoRLS (Lovers of Russian Literature). Later, Ilya and his wife, Olga, become active in the samizdat movement. Mikhal has a passion for literature and a questionable status because he is a Jew. Fragile Sanya immerses himself in music. Also populating the novel are scientists, artists, educators, retired generals, apparatchiks, dissenters, KGB agents, and KGB informants, many of them grappling with how difficult it was to combine decency and flexibility toward the whims of the authorities. The book is as much a collection of stories, several of which can stand on their own, as it is a sustained narrative. Taken as a whole, it loops back on itself, using a bendable approach to chronology to reveal characters and flesh out events. The stark realities of life under a repressive regime are vividly portrayed, as are life's daily joys and satisfactions. Give this to readers who like Russian literature and big, realistic fiction.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest from Ulitskaya (The Funeral Party) is a massive, swirling epic, stretching across half a century and chronicling the lives and adventures of three artistic childhood friends: Ilya, the photographer; Mikha, the poet and literature hound; and Sanya, the musician. The trio, considered outcasts by their peers, grow up in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and find common ground as members of the "Lovers of Russian Letters" group, founded by their teacher, Victor Yulievich, a WWII veteran. As they age, they drift in and out of each others' lives. Ilya turns radical and begins a secret bookbinding business, trafficking illegal texts into the U.S.S.R. Mikha, hoping to do good, finds himself in trouble with the law after he attempts to help exiled writers. And Sanya, after an injury to his hand, loses his drive to play piano. Ulitskaya weaves narratives both brief and prolonged into these stories, introducing, among others, Olga, Ilya's second wife, and her two lifelong chums, Tamara-brilliant, destined for medical work-and Galya, who ends up wed to a man investigating Ilya's unlawful activities. The author crafts an enthralling world, encapsulating many characters' entire lives succinctly before slowly revealing biographical details in later chapters. The effect is mazelike, with the story jumping back and forth on various time lines. The prose is dense, but readers will come away wholly satisfied. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sweeping novel of life in the Cold War Soviet Union, with plenty between the lines about life in Putin's Russia today. With only a dozen or so major characters, Ulitskaya's (Sonechka, 2005, etc.) latest doesn't threaten to rival War and Peace or The Possessed on the dramatis personae front. Still, it obviously harbors epic intentions and ambitions, spanning years and lifetimes and treating the largest possible themes. The latter include some of the most classic questions of all: the nature of love, the value of friendship, and, inevitably, the sorrow of betrayal. The early part of the story is set in the tumultuous years following the death of Josef Stalin (which, Ulitskaya notes with quiet satisfaction, occurred on Purim), when three schoolboys bond in friendship. Nerdy and bookish, they are playground victims, despised as outcasts and outsiders precisely "due to their complete disinclination to fight or be cruel." As the three grow into manhood, they struggle against the odds to remain more or less pure of heart even as Soviet society enters into a new era of anti-Semitism and oppressionfor though Stalin is dead, his machinery of terror lives on. Still outsiders, Ilya, Sanya, and Mikha are artists, intellectuals, dissidents. If Mikha begins with the most promise, not only blessed with an endlessly curious mind, but also "possessed of an inchoate creative fire," the others are brilliant, too. Among many other things, Ulitskaya's novel is also about the power of books, writing, and music to shape lives worth living. But more, it is about what happens to people inside a prison society: denunciations, hardship, and punishment ensue as surely as night follows day. The novel is impressively vast in scope and commodious in shape; still, reading of, say, Ilya's love for the resonant Olga, "with her slightly chapped lips, her pale freckles sprinkled over her white skin, the center of his life," one wants more. Indeed, the greatest tragedy of Ulitskaya's story is that it comes to an end. Worthy of shelving alongside Doctor Zhivago: memorable and moving. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
