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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Only a Miracle Could Save Us: Life and Survival under Stalin's Terror, by Irina Sherbakova (NF)
Rights sold: Germany - CAMPUS
For many years, we knew next to nothing about the private lives of ordinary Soviet citizens during Stalin’s reign. Until very recently, the social history of the Soviet Union written by Soviet and Western historians alike was limited entirely to the public sphere – politics and ideology, and the collective experience of the ‘Soviet masses’. The individual (insofar as he or she appeared at all) featured mainly as a letter-writer to the Soviet authorities (that is, as a public actor rather than a private person or member of a family).
It was only from the end of the 1980s that the practice of oral history – politically impossible in the earlier Soviet period – began to develop in Russia. Public organizations like Memorial, established in the late 1980s to represent the victims of repression and record their history, took the lead, collecting testimonies from survivors of the Gulag. This was an urgent and important task in the glasnost period because these survivors were disappearing fast and because their memories were practically the only source of reliable information about life inside the camps.
Russian journalist and historian Irina Sherbakova of Memorial in Moscow was one of these who interviewed many Gulag survivors…
For her new book Sherbakova has selected the five life stories, five examples of oral history, each in its own way depicting the inhuman policy of Soviet regime during different stages of Stalin’s reign. Among her protagonists are the biologist who was arrested as a ‘wife of an enemy of the people’ and even in prison remained a convinced follower of the Communist ideology; the young Trotskyist who survived through many Gulag prison camps; the son of a German actress who was pursued solely because of his origin; the Red Army officer to whom a single joke about Stalin cost career and freedom… Sherbakova begins a book with the story of her own family, with recollections of her grandfather, who was a Bolshevik and a member of the Comintern and later fell into disfavor.
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Unlike other East European countries, Russia is not striving for a critical appraisal of its Communist past. A dedicated work of Memorial society members, including Irina Sherbakova, is a rare exception. Sherbakova have definitely chosen the only correct method of presentation, because the terror of Stalinism can not be expressed in abstract numbers. Much more impressive is the presentation of an individual biographies, each reflecting the precarious history of the Soviet Union. -
Russian Marmalade, collected plays by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2005)
Rights sold: France - GALLIMARD, Germany - HENSCHEL, Russia - EKSMO, AST
Collection of plays for theater ("Russian Marmalade", "My Grandson Benjamin", and "The Seven Saints from Bruho Village").
Russian Marmalade is a play clearly created in dialogue with Anton Chekhov’s «Cherry Orchard». The play’s heroes live in the same kind of old house with the same cherry trees growing all around, only the cherries themselves get made into jam to be sold to provide the owners of the home with their sole means of survival. It is the end of the twentieth century and Russia has changed course yet again as the old system crumbles.
None of the doors close and the electricity does not always work, but mobile phones are busy ringing all the time. The sentimental Chekhovian girl in this play, it turns out, works round the clock for an erotic phone line, unsuspected, it seems, by her respectable parents. This time it is not old monarchist Russia that is crumbling, but the Soviet regime as it gives way to the Yeltsin years. The “new Russians” sell and resell their parents’ dacha, and the parents, pushed onto the sidelines of life, don’t know where to turn anymore. These unhappy tales are infused with philosophical dread and deep psychological analysis. Ulitskaya tells her tales as only she knows how – in a comic, almost grotesque tone, turning a melancholy play with a Chekhovian plot into a bright and buoyant comedy.
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