I am now about halfway through
Lyudmila Ulitskaya's The Big Green Tent (in English translation). The book is epic -- nearly 600 pages in English. It does remind me a bit of reading the Russian existential thinkers in my history of philosophy course with Brian Sayers in the late 1980's; there is a sort of grim satisfaction, or at least acceptance, of the cruel world that surrounds the characters.
Goodreads summarizes the book as follows:
[The book] 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, 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 prospects for 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 fomenting paranoia, division,
and self-betrayal. An artist is chased into the woods, where he remains
in hiding for four years; a researcher is forced to deem a patient
insane, damning him to torture in a psychiatric ward; a man and his wife
each become collaborators, without the other knowing. Ludmila
Ulitskaya's big yet intimate novel belongs to the tradition of
Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: a work of politics, love, and
belief that is a revelation of life in dark times.
Highly recommended.
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