LUDMILA ULITSKAYA
November 2010
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Unless otherwise indicated, all excerpts of poems quoted in this edition are translated by me. In order of appearance, the poems are:
“Outside it was cold…”: Mikhail Kuzmin.
“Gogol”: Pyotr Vyazemsky.
“To an army wife, in Sardis”: Sappho, trans. Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958).
“The Sparrow. From Catullus”: Francis Fawkes (1761).
Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, trans. Waclaw Lednicki (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955).
“Thus it begins. At two or so they rush…”: Boris Pasternak.
“Some are of stone, some are of clay…”: Marina Tsvetaeva.
“The Stormy Petrel”: Maxim Gorky.
“Hamlet”: Pasternak.
“When in the country, musing, I wander…”: Alexander Pushkin.
“Flux”: Vladimir Narbut.
“Let me not go mad—”: Alexander Pushkin.
“Deaf-mute Demons”: Maximilian Voloshin.
Deaf-mute Demons
by Maximilian Voloshin
Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger whom I sent? who is blind as he who is perfect, and blind as the Lord’s servant?
—Isaiah 42.19
They walk the earth
Blind and deaf and dumb
And draw fiery signs
In the spreading gloom.
Illuminating the abyss,
They see nothing.
They create, not knowing
Their own predestination.
Through the murky underworld
They beam a prophetic ray …
Their fates are the face of God
Casting light amid the storm clouds.
29 December 1917
“Childhood”: Boris Pasternak.
“Letter to General Z.”: Joseph Brodsky (1968).
“Memory is an armless equestrian statue…”: Eduard Limonov.
“It will not perish in our wake—” from “Three Poems for Joseph Brodsky”: Natalia Gorbanevskaya.
“In the madhouse…” from “To Yuri Galanskov”: Natalia Gorbanevskaya.
“Brush the bliss of half-sleep from your cheek…” from “To Dima Borisov”: Natalia Gorbaevskaya.
“Koktebel”: Maxim Voloshin.
“The Hurricane”: Eshref Shemi-Zade.
Hamlet: William Shakespeare.
“The Old House”: Innokenty Annensky.
“Winter’s Eve”: Boris Pasternak.
“When will the pall on my / Ailing heart disperse?”: Evgeny Baratynsky.
“August”: Joseph Brodsky.
“Bagatelle (To Elizaveta Lionskaya)”: Joseph Brodsky.
“The secret is…” from Glory: Vladimir Nabokov (Wellesley, 1942).
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 on the judges’ list for the Man Booker International Prize. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY LUDMILA ULITSKAYA
The Funeral Party: A Novel
Medea and Her Children
Sonechka: A Novella and Stories
Daniel Stein, Interpreter: A Novel
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
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
About the Author
Also by Ludmila Ulitskaya
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2010 by Ludmila Ulitskaya
Translation copyright © 2015 by Bela Shayevich
All rights reserved
Originally published in Russian in 2010 by Eksmo, Russia, as Зеленый шатер
English translation published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2015
An excerpt from The Big Green Tent originally appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker.
Published by arrangement with ELKOST International Literary Agency, Barcelona, Spain
Grateful acknowledgment is made to University of California Press Books for permission to reprint an excerpt from “To an army wife, in Sardis,” by Sappho, translated by Mary Barnard, from Sappho: A New Translation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ulitskaia, Liudmila.
[Zelenyi shater. English]
The big green tent / Ludmila Ulitskaya; translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich. — First American edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-16667-0 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-70971-6 (ebook)
1. Male friendship—Soviet Union—Fiction. 2. Soviet Union—Social conditions—1945–1991—Fiction. 3. Soviet Union—Intellectual life—Fiction. I. Shayevich, Bela, translator. II. Title.
PG3489.2 .L58Z4513 2014
891.73'5—dc23
2014016972
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Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.
* When they were teenagers, the writers and activists Alexander Herzen (Sasha) (1812–1870) and Nikolay Ogarev (Nick) (1813–1877) famously took an oath on the Sparrow Hills, vowing to dedicate their lives to fighting tyranny.
* Julian calendar (so-called Old Style date). Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918, but many religious holidays were still celebrated according to their Old Style dates.