French theatrical company LA COMPAGNIE DES MOTS MIGRATEURS presents a performance for children UNE VICTOIRE EN PAPIER based on Ulitskaya's works - February 2009
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Experiences, collected stories by Marina Vishneventskaya
Rights sold: Germany – DTV (anthology rights), France – ACTES SUD, FAYARD (anthology rights), Italy – DI RENZO, AVAGLIANO (anthology rights), Hungary – GABO (anthology rights), USA – COLORADO (anthology rights)
The problematics of female introspection reaches in Vishnevetskaya’s Experiences its climactic concentration. These unhappy allegorical stories, told in the first person, depict subsidiary and “background” characters, marginal individuals belonging to various social and age groups. The title of each novella in the book corresponds to the initials of the “narrator,” which usually remain undeciphered, and a hinting phrase about a unique experience, which she or he will be sharing with the reader. Structurally, each piece is reminiscent of a confessional monologue about a certain traumatic or healing encounter, which through the process of revelation — or overcoming of the self — construes the female identity in its completeness. Almost all of Vishnevetskaya’s descriptions of mundane experiences —grievance, hope, attraction, parting, monotony, etc. — can be summarized under one encompassing experience of “discovering the self.”
The most intense piece in this text, The Experience of Love, was lauded by critics and received prestigious awards in 2003. A paralyzed woman, dying from cancer and placed in a sanatorium by her relatives, is taping the story of her meager and ordinary biography.
The association between the masculine gaze and the feminine image, which has been the basis of various literary schemes and feminist theories, is treated in a curious way in The Experience of Not Partaking. In an ironic, detached voice the narrator describes his interaction with women as Japanese minimalism —he neither touches nor speaks to them — just exchanges glances. By casting a meticulously terrorizing gaze that forces a woman to freeze in either awe or inexplicable horror, he pulls her into an unfair game, one that she has already lost.
In Vishnevetskaya’s prose the sensitive and ineluctable experiences of separation and breakups appear as fundamental elements in constructing the female subjectivity. In The Experience of Other and The Experience of Disappearing, two completely dissimilar heroines — an old village woman, whose husband was killed years ago and who finds out that her sister’s children were conceived from him, and a young city girl who must reject her lover and whose mother’s clinical schizophrenia is a biological threat to her offspring—are going through an identical experience: the discovery of a certain void (or, psychoanalytically speaking, a trauma), which occurs at the moment of either affected or self-inflicted loss of a loved one. Moreover, the days and years that accumulate from this moment don’t ease the unwanted traumatic effects, but carve the very essence of the woman’s character. Such irreducible themes give Vishnevetskaya’s prose an edge and contemporaneity.
The black humor of The Experience of Demonstrating Grievance definitely stands out from the uniformly lyric tone of the book, enriching its stylistic qualities. The grotesqueness of the story is rendered through the ridiculously difficult process of choosing a proper dress that will emphasize the heroine’s femininity and attractiveness.
Vishnevetskaya’s Experiences — based on readership success and awards — is one of the most persuasive and compelling instances in the arena of contemporary Russian women’s prose. - Context Literary Magazine
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Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, a novel by Guzel Yakhina (2015)
German rights are handled by Christina Links:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Azerbaijan - QANUN, Bosnia - BUYBOOK, Bulgaria - COLIBRI, China - The People´s Literature, Croatia - HENA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, Denmark - JP/POLITIKENS, Estonia - TANAPAEV, Finland - INTO, France - NOIR SUR BLANC, France (large print) - Éditions Voir de près, Germany - AUFBAU, Hungary - EUROPA, India - SHARDA (hindi), Italy - SALANI, Israel - CARMEL, Iran - NILOOFAR, Japan - HAKUSUISHA, Kazakhstan - FOLIANT, S.Korea - WALKER (Geodneunsaram), Latvia - ZVAIGZNE, Lithuania - ALMA LITTERA, Macedonia - ANTOLOG, Mongolia - MASH NUUTS MEDIA, Netherlands - QUERIDO, Norway - CAPPELEN DAMM, Poland - NOIR SUR BLANC, Portugal - BERTRAND, Romania - HUMANITAS, Russia - AST, Serbia - SAMIZDAT, Slovakia - SLOVART, Spain - Acantilado, Sweden - Ersatz, Tatar language – Tatar Publishing House, Turkey - TEAS, Ukraine - BookChef, Uzbekistan - ZABARJAD MEDIA (book edition), SUG'DIYONA (magazine rights), World English - ONEWORLD, World Arabic - ARAB SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHERS, World Esperanto - ARS LIBRI
Winner of the 2020 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa International Literary Award (Italy)
Finalist of the the 2020 EBRD Literature Prize (UK)
Winner of the 2018 Abolhassan Najafi Award for the best translated novel (Iran)
FInalist of the Prix Médicis award (2017, France)
Prix du magazine "Transfuge" (2017, France)
Winner of the 2015 Big Book literary award
Winner of the People's Choice open online voting for the 2015 Big Book literary award
Winner of the 2015 "Ticket to the Stars" prize
Winner of the 2015 Best Prosaic Work of the Year prize
Winner of the 2015 Yasnaya Polyana award
Winner of the People's Choice open online voting for the 2015 Yasnaya Polyana award
Finalist of the 2015 Russian Booker literary award
Finalist of the the 2015 NOS literary award
Guzel Yakhina’s debut novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes is an enjoyable and smooth novel, unpretentious mainstream historical fiction that covers a lot of cultural, ethnic, religious, and sociopolitical issues.
The novel begins in 1930 in a Tatar village, from which a kulak woman Zuleikha is quickly sent into exile after her husband is murdered by communists. Zuleikha’s own life — after seeing her husband killed, after a horrendous train trip to a spot on the Angara River where her group of exiles will settle, and after a difficult first winter that kills many — settles into a new routine with characters nothing like her village neighbors. The characters are many but distinct, and they include a rather dotty doctor, an artist who paints on the sly, and urbane city dwellers who remember past European travels, as well as Ignatov, Zuleikha’s husband’s killer. Ignatov is persuaded to remain in the settlement, as its commandant, and he stays because of his own political issues back in Kazan. Most important, there is Zuleikha’s son Yuzuf, born in the settlement, who develops an interest for art and learns to paint.
Yakhina’s writing is simple, albeit sprinkled with Tatar words (there’s a glossary). Yakhina herself has said that the novel is about how Zuleikha wakes up, opens her eyes to the world, and finds happiness, albeit a bitter one. Another is, again, Yakhina’s ability to use a simple structure and language to tell her story, all as she plants details that will have meaning later in the book.
Guzel Yakhina´s novel hits directly in the heart. It’s a powerful praise for love and tenderness in hell.
Ludmila Ulitskaya
There’s something that Guzel Yakhina succeeded to transmit with amazing, sharp exactness: women’s attitude towards love. Not towards the subject of love, but towards the love itself.
Anna Narinskaya, literary critic
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