Ludmila Ulitskaya is largely known for her lengthy and wide-ranging novels, but she has also authored novellas, plays, and short stories. The Body of the Soul (O tele dushi), translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is her most recent short story collection, published in Russia in 2019. The collection is divided into two parts, “Girlfriends” and “The Body of the Soul,” each prefaced by a short piece that functions “In lieu of an introduction” (italics in the text). The introduction to “Girlfriends” expresses a writer’s affection for her many close female friends, some of whom are no longer living; the introduction to “The Body of the Soul” is a writer’s assessment that she is entering “the final episode” of her life and pondering the question of existence.
Like her namesake Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Ulitskaya is one of the most famous living Russian writers, who is also well known outside of her birthplace. The two authors’ paths to recognition were different: Petrushevskaya’s work initially caused controversy with its unflinching portrayals of life’s brutality, while Ulitskaya’s less graphic writing was immediately lauded by readers and critics. By now, both writers have been staples of contemporary Russian literature for decades, garnering many awards, with Ulitskaya becoming the first woman to win the Russian Booker Prize in 2001 for The Kukotsky Enigma, whose protagonist is a pro-abortion gynecologist in Stalin’s USSR.
Something else Petrushevskaya and Ulitskaya have in common is vocal criticism of Putin’s regime. Petrushevskaya returned a state prize awarded to her by Putin in response to his attempts to close Memorial, a Russian human-rights group preserving the history of victims of Stalinist terror and state repression (the Russian government shut it down in 2022). Ulitskaya participated in the 2012 Bolotnaya Square election fraud protests and the 2014 anti-war protests against Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Unsurprisingly, both writers have taken a public stance against Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, representing two ways of protesting the war. Petrushevskaya speaks out while living in Russia; Ulitskaya, after publishing a statement condemning the invasion, has left the country.
Rather than Ulitskaya’s anti-regime stance, it is her use of swear words that, according to the explanation on the cover of the original, has earned The Body of the Soul an 18+ label in Russia. The fact that this advisory resulted from a very small amount of non-standard vocabulary instead of Ulitskaya’s content is confounding in a Russia turned virulently homophobic under Putin (during the writing of this review, the Ministry of Justice designated the international LGBT movement an extremist organization, effectively criminalizing all LGBT activity in Russia). The story that opens “Girlfriends” and therefore the entire collection is “The Dragon and the Phoenix,” whose female protagonists are married to each other (perhaps the term “lesbian” that appears in the text was deemed one of the swear words). Characteristically, Ulitskaya presents these protagonists without judgment, indeed with a certain cachet: until her incurable illness, larger-than-life Zarifa was a high-powered lawyer, and she and Musya “were the first couple of this kind from Russia to register their marriage in Amsterdam,” where the two had relocated. Although Zarifa’s family members refuse to recognize the marriage, Zarifa’s and Musya’s friends and colleagues, like Ulitskaya herself, readily accept them as a familial unit.
“The Dragon and the Phoenix” showcases another key Ulitskaya theme: the reconciliation of different cultures, religions, and people, an attitude reflective of her own life experience. Born Jewish and later converting to Russian Orthodoxy, Ulitskaya considers herself part of both traditions, and this bridging of elements with a long and hostile history is one of the mainstays of her work. Zarifa is Azeri, while Musya is Armenian, and their marriage brings together two cultures with centuries of conflict (the fact that their hometown “in Karabakh had long since been […] divided into […] Armenian and Azerbaijani” areas acquires poignancy in 2023, given Azerbaijan’s expulsion of the Armenian population from Nagorno-Karabakh). This theme of rapprochement extends to the narrative as a whole. As Zarifa lies dying from cancer, she asks one of her friends “why it’s impossible to seat Armenians and Azerbaijanis at the same table.” The friend has no answer, but the story itself is geared precisely toward this reconciliation. Although Zarifa’s relatives pointedly refused to attend her and Musya’s wedding, her brother Saïd acquiesces to her request that he come to Amsterdam to say good-bye and bring a family rug, featuring a dragon and phoenix, to drape over her coffin. At the funeral, Musya’s Armenian-language “cry had the same ancient force that was depicted […] by the long-dead Azerbaijani artisan, and they merged into one, and everyone in the room wept.” Moreover, as the narrator notes, “Who was the husband, who the wife, no one cared,” with Saïd coming to accept both his lesbian sister and her Armenian partner.
The rest of the stories in “Girlfriends” also feature characters with multicultural backgrounds, or spouses from different countries, or Russians who travel widely, though other themes take precedence. The protagonist of “Alisa Buys Death” is a woman in her 60’s who, in attempting to control the manner of her passing, falls in love, including the physical kind; while depictions of older women’s sexuality are rare in Russian literature, Ulitskaya openly shows it in her work (the eponymous protagonist of her short story “Gulia” is a woman of very advanced age who wittily engineers a one-night stand with her best friend’s son). In “A Foreigner,” a matchmaking mother in Moscow sets her daughter up with an Iraqi exchange student, which leads to a chain of events involving Saddam Hussein’s war against the Kurds and a forced emigration offering new possibilities. “Blessed Are Those Who …” features two sisters, estranged from each other and from their mother for most of their lives, who grow close after their mother’s death when they discover a side of her they did not know existed.
Ulitskaya not only resists the totalitarian regime, but also certain cultural and literary gender clichés. As the title “Girlfriends” suggests, these stories mainly, though not wholly, feature female protagonists, many of whom do not conform to traditional gender expectations: they are older women, single mothers, child-free women, women more devoted to their careers than their children, and/or women who are sexually active. To be sure, as some scholars have noted, it is the male characters in Ulitskaya’s fiction who are the intellectuals, artists, and scientists, while her female characters are more quotidian in their pursuits. This gendered attitude is on display in The Body of the Soul as well, where the women are frequently occupied with the everyday and the narrators occasionally opine on women’s behavior and interests as though these were biologically determined. At the same time, some of the female protagonists are engaged in scholarly endeavors; no matter their occupations, Ulitskaya portrays her female, as well as male, characters with affection, admiring their resilience and accepting their flaws with good-natured irony.
The seven stories in “The Body of the Soul” are unified by the theme of the transition from life to death and the continued existence of a person’s inner essence in different form. Trained as a geneticist, Ulitskaya frequently includes medical/biological elements in her fiction, often alongside spiritual matters. Not surprisingly, this combination is present in stories whose characters hover on the border between physicality and whatever comes after. In “The Autopsy,” a pathoanatomist who feels himself “the last caretaker of the temple abandoned by the soul” has his life altered forever when he performs the procedure on a murdered musician. The young biology lab worker in “Slaughtered Souls” is sent to a meat-processing plant to extract “the pig gland called epiphysis”; in an animal-welfare twist, it is the pigs’ life-to-death transition that’s highlighted here, with the protagonist coming face to face with the process of dying in witnessing the slaughter.
Unlike for the slaughtered animals, whose final state is food for people, the process of crossing over is largely liberatory for the human characters. Abandoned by her husband, Sonya in “Aqua Allegoria” exists on a diet of apples, leading to a fantastical transformation where, reminiscent of the ending of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, creatures “like herself fluttered around her.” Tolik, the incurably ill photographer in “A Man in a Mountainous Landscape,” triumphs over his earthly miseries as the “landscape accept[s] him” and he merges with his beloved mountains in Tajikistan. In “A Serpentine Road,” Nadezhda Georgievna is a highly skilled librarian who has spent her life in pursuit of knowledge until she begins to lose her prodigious memory; yet this loss leads not to tragedy, but to her finally acquiring what she has always sought: “here was a world […] of perfect knowledge, and it had no boundaries.” In a different and more humorous vein, “Woof-Woof” recounts a family’s passing down a toy dog from one generation to the next, and one owner’s conviction, after reading mystical texts that “shook the rust-eaten premises of healthy Marxism-Leninism,” that the dog’s soul lives on in her son. “Two Together” depicts a couple’s night of sexual pleasure as a “conversation they had been ceaselessly conducting for thirty years” and undercuts reader expectations in its handling of the body’s ability to communicate when humans no longer can.
As translators, Pevear and Volokhonsky often provoke strong reactions, admired by some and castigated by others for awkwardness or inaccuracies. In The Body of the Soul, they convey well Ulitskaya’s flowing prose, as well as her humor and irony. There are occasional odd turns of phrase, such as “no one took the phone,” a direct translation from Russian instead of the more normal-sounding “picked up” in English. There is a content error in “Alisa Buys Death,” where the narrator says Alexander Yefimovich’s “brother” introduced him to Alisa, while the character who initiates the introduction is actually a woman (his cousin, in the Russian original). This gender change, however, does not affect the content, and the few translation stumbles do not take away from the reading. The Body of the Soul is a relatively slim but poignantly rich collection that makes a welcome addition to Ulitskaya’s corpus available to English-speaking audiences.
[Published by Yale University Press on October 31, 2023, 156 pages, $18.00 US paperback]