ELKOST International literary agency - World English rights in Ulitskaya's Under The Green Tent (Imago) are sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Just as it was announced in Historical Fiction Book Deals: Week of April 30 of Publisher's Weekly, World English rights in Booker International Prize finalist Ludmila Ulitskaya's UNDER THE GREEN TENT title, a sweeping novel about the Soviet Union's dissident generation, set in the decades after the death of Joseph Stalin, are sold by ELKOST Intl. literary agency to Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Macmillan).

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Agnessa, by Mira Yakovenko (NF)

Rights sold: Czech Republic - MARATON, Poland - ZNAK

The recorded oral memories of Agnes Mironova (1903-1982) is a must book for anybody who wants to know what was a personal life like under Stalinism. For the first time ever, Agnes’s notes open the secret door into living rooms and boudoirs of Stalin's "hangmen", top-ranked Soviet secret police officers during the purges of 1930-40ies. However, anyone who reads this book with the intention to better understand the past, will also discover an outstanding female character, a gorgeous bitch, a proud predator, who reveals all truths about herself frankly and without keeping anything back. A life story of this unique woman, so beautiful and repulsive at once, has developed during the most terrible and bloody period of modern history.

She has always shaped her own destiny in line with XIXth-century model of aggressive female personality in search of perfect husband. Her acumen and self-centeredness are reminiscent of the strong character and high degree of self-interest of Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. There’s no bigotry or hypocrisy in Agnes’s life ideology, she is too proud and self-assured in her own attractiveness and her feminine power over men. At certain moments of her life, she demonstrates a highest degree of determination mixed with filibusterism.

One of Agnes’s husbands, ‘the main love of her life’ as she dubbed him, was ambitious and energetic NKVD officer Sergei Mironov. Thanks to his extremely fast and successful career, Agnes got to the very top society of the Stalin era. Later, after Mironov was arrested and executed, Agnes began a new life with a new husband. We follow the amazing trajectory of her life full of most drastic contrasts: first she talks with Stalin at the New Year celebration party in Kremlin, and next freezes in some Gulag camp lost in cold Kazakh steppes; first she lives alone with her husband in a huge mansion once belonging to the royal governor of Siberia, and next in a miserable pigeonhole in communal apartment in Moscow; first she travels in a luxury saloon cars and limos, and next is a prisoner of the NKVD jail.

Aged Agnes has shared her life story with a younger friend; she definitely wasn’t trying to elicit sympathy or compassion, but rather to revive the memories of the bright and happy days when she was so victorious, beloved, beautiful, and nicely-dressed.

The memories of Agnes Mironova is more than just an interesting biography with rich historical background; it’s a fascinating text with exactly grasped conversational tone that conveys something that no archive document can revive: everyday life, ordinary characters, ideas, and finally, the mythology of the past.

Oral memories of Agnes Mironova recorded by Mira Yakovenko were first published in 2008 by Memorial Society. In 2012, Irina Sherbakova, the head of Moscow Memorial Society, has prepared an extensive commentary, a preface to Agnes’s book, and the index of all historical figures mentioned in the book. Available also a collection of photos from Agnes’s personal archive.

Technical details: 89.837 words, 499.782 symbols with spaces in the translated manuscript + 8.317 words, 56.953 symbols with spaces in the introductory article + аcollection of photos from family album

- There are many fine works that offer harrowing accounts of the fate of Stalin's innocent victims. This book is different. Agnessa was the beautiful, strong-willed, frivolous, and loving wife of a regional boss of Stalin's secret police who shut her eyes to the murderous activities of her husband. She offers a unique account of what it was like to be the wife of a high-ranking member of the Soviet elite, enjoying fine food, high fashion, 'ladies-in-waiting,' and lavish holidays at a time when millions were starving or being worked to death. Her gripping story provides insight into the thuggish world of cronyism, backstabbing, and intrigue that typified the Stalinist elite, a world in which the guilty feared they would meet the same sticky end as that to which they had condemned millions of innocent people. Agnessa's life would be marked by tragedy, and she would rise to its challenges. But it is her partial complicity in the world of which she is a part, the fact that she is a very flawed heroine, that makes her account so compelling.

--S.A. Smith, All Souls College, Oxford

Just the Plague, a screenplay by Ludmila Ulitskaya (1988, 2020)

Rights sold: France - GALLIMARD, Germany - HANSER, Hungary - MAGVETO, Italy - LA NAVE DI TESEO, Iran - HOUPAA BOOKS, Poland - WYDAWNICTWO LITERACKIE, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Sweden - ERSATZ, World English - GRANTA

The EBRD Literature Prize 2022 Shortlist

Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novelized screenplay Just the Plague, written in 1988 and first published in 2020, is based on real-life events when an epidemic of pneumonic plague was averted in December 1939. Three people died, but it could have claimed many more lives. Ostensibly about a medical plague, the real plague is the Stalinist police state which, with its trials, executions and banishments, had got completely out of hand. This is a hard-hitting, precise and powerful evocation of the time, with obvious relevance to the present state of Russia and the present pandemic.

The manuscript was politically unpublishable for many years, and it was only when sorting through her papers during the coronavirus lockdown that Ulitskaya came across it again. She found it highly topical, and comments, ‘They say that if a rifle is hanging on the wall in the first act, it needs to go off in the last act. I have written many things over the years which did not get published, but suddenly found this rifle could still fire, and not blanks either. The script is right up to date.’

The protagonist, Rudolph Mayer, is a microbiologist, who works on developing a vaccine in a lab in Saratov. Due to his own negligence he becomes infected with the deadly disease moments before he is summoned to Moscow to present a report on his findings. His concerns about not being quite ready are brushed off. Mayer says goodbye to his girlfriend and baby daughter and boards the train. He falls ill upon arrival at a hotel, having created a chain of potentially infected people along the way.

What follows is a historically accurate account of the urgent measures taken by the Soviet authorities to contain the spread of the lethal virus. All efforts are thrown into tracing Mayer’s journey from Saratov to Moscow, locating everyone with whom he came into contact. Shortly after, ominous black cars disperse in various directions in the middle of the night, to collect the potential victims of the virus. Unspoilt by justice of the Stalinist regime or clarity of information, people immediately assume that they are being arrested. Some already know what to pack to take with them, their relatives are in shock but not surprised. One of the characters willfully denounces her partner in fear for her own life. Another character - a military official - shoots himself.

But even life defined by fear and violence leaves space for the generosity of human spirit and the ability to sacrifice. Doctor Sorin immediately recognizes Mayer's symptoms, and isolates with the dying patient, knowing that he would very soon die too. He writes a letter to Stalin pleading for a release of his wrongly imprisoned brother. The doctor’s final gesture is as poignant as it is pointless: it is highly unlikely that the letter will ever get to its mighty addressee, for reasons not exclusively related to the plague.

Eventually, with impressive speed, all the dots are joined and potential carriers are placed under quarantine in hospital. The story ends when quarantine is lifted. It’s early spring and the church doors open for the Easter service. It’s a new life, and life, whatever it might be, goes on.

Ulitskaya’s prose is known for its minimal introspection, and her literary voice is similar in tone to John Steinbeck, Doris Lessing and Julian Barnes. She appears detached and 'stays behind the camera', yet Just the Plague is not simply an exhibition of human reactions to a crisis. What we observe makes us ask ourselves about our own reactions. What is essential to me right now? Do I seek comfort in being controlled? Am I prepared to take responsibility or make a sacrifice? In a world where we work so hard to minimize suffering or discomfort of any kind, can we remain compassionate? Of course an epidemic of a deadly disease is not unheard of in human history. And now that we are in the midst of it, perhaps this is our chance to truly comprehend its effect on us, our future, and on our future relationship with authority. Today, when we are all affected by something we know so little about, it’s hard to find a more topical read.

‘Ulitskaya’s idiosyncratic, fragmentary structure succeeds in capturing the oppressive atmosphere of that time precisely’ -- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

‘In some societies, it can be a comfort when it is just the plague [i.e. when the plague is reason for detention]. These and other scenes in the German edition are rendered with terse, immediate and disturbing effect, thanks to the translation by Ganna-Maria Braungardt’ -- Süddeutsche Zeitung

‘A sarcastic and macabre hymn of praise to the Soviet secret police, who stopped the plague from spreading, thereby showing how widely it had already poisoned society’ -- Ingo Schulze

‘A grimly good book’ -- Frankfurter Rundschau