A world with no boundaries

Ludmila Ulitskaya is a badass. She is a Russian short story writer, playwright, and novelist who was born in the Ural Mountains and became a genetic scientist. Fired from the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in 1970 for distributing underground literature, she began her literary career several years later at the Hebrew Theatre of Moscow. Her first short story was published in 1990, just as the Soviet Union’s perestroika reforms were transforming the landscape she inhabited. Her work often perceives and subtly visits the boundaries between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—three religions that powerfully shape Russian and post-Soviet realities but are rarely discussed except as conflictual. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ulitskaya has lived internationally—at various times in Israel and Italy and, since March 2022, in Berlin. Two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she published an op-ed in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta in which she wrote, “Pain, fear, shame—this is what I feel today.”

Now 80, Ulitskaya is writing fearlessly and with mature depth. On the surface, her new stories have a plainness that is reminiscent of Chekhov. They almost always begin in a realist frame. Alisa, an engineering draftsman, installs a bathtub. A busybody woman tries to arrange a marriage for her accountant daughter. Zhenya buys a pair of unique walking shoes for which she does not have the name, moccasin. Most of the stories take place in a time period between an insulated Soviet Union and an emerging capitalistic and global reality.

In nearly every case, something happens to twist the realist framework and take the story onto a different plane. At the beginning of the book, the shifts are subtle and somewhat familiar: love disrupts characters’ well-laid plans, or death reveals long-held secrets. But as the book traces the route from body to soul, magical realism enters the picture. Characters talk with the dead. They leave their bodies and visit long-abandoned places. One character becomes a butterfly.