The Body of the Soul
by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Yale University Press, 153 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Women can do everything, and men can do the rest. I first heard the proverb thirty years ago when I was teaching English as a second language to Soviet Jewish immigrants at a place called NYANA (the New York Association for New Americans). My female students relished quoting it, and, probably because they always prefaced it with “In Russia we say,” I have remembered it as “Russian women can do everything.”
I remember also that, when I was a child and before I had ever met any Russian person, the thought of a Russian woman brought either of two starkly contrasting images to mind: an ethereally lithe and beautiful young dancer costumed as a swan, or a burly woman of indeterminate age with a weathered face, wearing a babushka and gripping the huge wheel of a tractor. Whenever I heard the proverb—and despite my knowing that it takes far greater muscle to dance Odette/Odile than to drive a tractor—it was the tractor driver I saw.
All this came back to me as I read and watched interviews with Ludmila Ulitskaya, the eighty-one-yearold Russian Jewish writer who has received international acclaim for her fiction (she has often been named as a contender for the Nobel) and who is also known for her political activism and opposition to Vladimir Putin. A lifelong resident of Moscow, Ulitskaya was trained as a scientist and worked as a geneticist before turning her hand first to theater and later to fiction. (Ending her first profession had not been a choice: she was deprived of it after a worker in her laboratory turned her and four fellow scientists in to the KGB for distributing samizdat.) She published her first short story in 1990 and, soon after, her first novel, Sonechka, which was short-listed for the 1993 Russian Booker Prize.*
Thus began a late-blooming but remarkably prolific career that has won Ulitskaya a vast readership in Russia and throughout Europe and a long list of literary accolades, including the 2001 Russian Booker for her novel . She is both the first woman to be awarded that prize and the writer who has received the most nominations for it. Another distinction has been her willingness to write about subjects considered taboo in Russia, such as religion, lesbianism, and abortion. in 2014 under the title “The Weight of Words,” which was my own introduction to Ulitskaya.)
