The Big Green Tent: A Novel

by Ludmila Ulitskaya, Polly Gannon (Translator)

Overview

Named a Must-Read Book by New York Magazine, Travel+Leisure, Flavorwire, and Bustle

Long-listed for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award in Fiction

With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s remarkable work tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys—-an orphaned poet, a gifted yet fragile pianist, and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets—-struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled.

Rich with love stories, intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic investigation into the possibilities for individual integrity in a society defined by the KGB. Each of the central characters seeks to transcend an oppressive regime through art, a love of Russian literature, and activism. And each of them ends up face-to-face with a secret police that is highly skilled at provoking paranoia, division, and self-betrayal. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel ultimately belongs to the tradition of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: it is a work consumed with politics, love, and belief—-and a discovery of light in dark times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250097446
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	01/10/2017
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	425,749
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ludmila Ulitskaya is one of Russia's most popular and renowned literary figures. A former scientist and the director of Moscow's Hebrew Repertory Theater, she is the author of fourteen works of fiction, three tales for children, and six plays that have been staged by a number of theaters in Russia and Germany. She has won Russia's Man Booker Prize and was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize. A strong advocate for freedom of expression, she recently published a volume of her correspondence with the imprisoned Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Table of Contents

Contents

Prologue

Those Wondrous School Years

The New Teacher

Children of the Underworld

The LORLs

The Last Ball

Friendship of the Peoples

The Big Green Tent

Love in Retirement

Orphans All

King Arthur’s Wedding

A Tad Too Tight

The Upper Register

Girlfriends

The Dragnet

The Angel with the Outsize Head

The House with the Knight

The Coffee Stain

The Fugitive

The Deluge

Hamlet’s Ghost

A Good Ticket

Poor Rabbit

The Road with One End

Deaf-mute Demons

Milyutin Park

First in Line

The Decorated Underpants

The Imago

A Russian Story

Ende Gut—

Epilogue: The End of a Beautiful Era

Acknowledgments

Translator’s Note

Editorial Reviews

As grand, solid, and impressively all-encompassing as the title implies.”—Lara Vapnyar, The New York Times Book Review

“One of Russia’s most famous writers...Compelling, addictive reading.”—Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

“Never boring...You don’t have to be a compatriot to admire Ulitskaya’s honesty and straight-faced irony, or her uncanny ability to marshal endless digressions and intentional stumbles into a gripping tale.”—Leonid Bershidsky, The Atlantic

“Like that other plot-forward dissident, Nobel winner Boris Pasternak, Ulitskaya puts characters first and politics second. According to the oddsmakers, she might follow him to Stockholm one day.”—Boris Kachka, New York magazine

"The Big Green Tent, for all its grand ambition, manages an intimacy that can leave a reader reeling....a masterpiece."—Colin Dwyer, NPR

"This may be the Big Book of the year."—The Millions

"With both intimacy and cosmic scope, Russian novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya weaves an engaging tale of a group of cold war-era Soviet friends....Ulitskaya’s easy-going manner and sense of humor are attractive and it doesn’t take long to trust she knows what she’s doing....The translation, by Polly Gannon, is light and lively, wonderfully devoid of accent or awkwardnesses."—The Christian Science Monitor

"A very interesting read as Ulitskaya covers with breathless gusto a period of Russian history unfamiliar to most American readers....You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll occasionally want to throw the book across the room in frustration—but you’ll keep reading."—Daniel Kalder, The Dallas Morning News

"Often it is achievement enough for a writer to depict a vast array of characters with insight and great sensitivity for each; Ulitskaya does this and more....It is undeniable that with this novel Ulitskaya has pulled off a multipronged feat."—Kim Hedges, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"As the book leaps effortlessly from year to year, character to character, it ingeniously tells the story of a generation that is at the same time in love with and at war with its homeland....A delight to read."—The Harvard Crimson

"One of the year’s best works of straightforward realism."—Flavorwire

"Ambitious and absorbing, The Big Green Tent carries its readers into the lost world of Soviet dissidents, and its hold is unwavering. This is a daring and moral work, but it is also, above all, a great story."—Peter Finn, coauthor of The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle over a Forbidden Book

"A sweeping novel of life in the Cold War Soviet Union, with plenty between the lines about life in Putin’s Russia today....The greatest tragedy of Ulitskaya’s story is that it comes to an end. Worthy of shelving alongside Doctor Zhivago: memorable and moving."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"For Western readers, the novel's sparkling imagery makes real the drab and dangerous Soviet era, with its scarcities and constant presence of the KGB. The characters are drawn with humor and melancholy yet endowed with hope and a love of literature. A great introduction for readers new to Ulitskaya."—Library Journal (starred review)

"One of the most important living Russian writers."—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story on Ludmila Ulitskaya

"Ludmila Ulitskaya arrives here not just as a shrewd novelist, but as a wise and evocative artist."—The Philadelphia Inquirer on Ludmila Ulitskaya

From the Publisher

10/20/2014
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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Ludmila Ulitskaya arrives here not just as a shrewd novelist, but as a wise and evocative artist.

The Philadelphia Inquirer on Ludmila Ulitskaya

One of the most important living Russian writers.

Gary Shteyngart

Ambitious and absorbing, The Big Green Tent carries its readers into the lost world of Soviet dissidents, and its hold is unwavering. This is a daring and moral work, but it is also, above all, a great story.

Peter Finn

A voice of moral authority for differently minded Russians, and one of Russia's most famous writers . . . [The Big Green Tent is] compelling, addictive reading.

The New Yorker Masha Gessen

★ 2015-08-18
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.

Kirkus Reviews