The Big Green Tent

October 20, 2014
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.

Starred review from September 1, 2015
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 oppression-for 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.

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Starred review from November 1, 2014
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2014

A former scientist who now directs Moscow's Hebrew Repertory Theater, Ulitskaya is an accomplished enough author of fiction, children's books, and plays to have won Russia's Booker Prize and been nominated for the International Man Booker Prize. Her new work aims to capture the risky radiance of the Soviet dissident experience. Opening in 1950s Moscow, it follows three friends--a poet, a pianist, and a photographer--as they come of age with the heroes they might use as models censored, jailed, or exiled. A big novel of social consequences, fitting its topic.

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