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Tomorrow There Will Be Happiness, edited by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2013, NF)
Rights sol to: Russia - AST, Poland - ŚWIAT KSIĄŻKI
In 2012, Ludmila Ulitskaya launched the major documentary project “After the Great Victory,” for which people who were children between 1945 and 1953 were invited to send in their childhood memories. Work that Ulitskaya selected was published by AST in 2013 in the collection “Tomorrow There Will Be Happiness” with Ulitskaya’s preface and comments.
This book is yet another project in social portraiture by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Its goal is to restore historical memory in Russia, a country burned many times over and still being burned. Ulitskaya chooses the relatively rare genre of folk memoir – the stories and witness accounts of “little people”. Written quite subjectively and without artifice, together they create the magical effect of compound vision, where space and the objects in it are simultaneously seen from all sides. Besides these mini-memoirs, the book also contains eighteen forewords by Lyudmila Ulitskaya and a recollection by the noted writer Alexander Kabakov. All this is framed in a wonderful photo gallery – photos from personal archives.
Voices of different people, men and women, villagers and city folk, meld into a many-voiced choir, into a shared story of how they all grew up together. How they embraced in the glow of the fireworks on May 9, 1945, how they pined for a piece of bread, how they dressed in castoffs, went around in father’s patched army shirts, washed in public baths, played with sticks and stones because there were no toys. The details of postwar life emerge sharp and dimensional, long-lost characters step out onto the stage – the result is a vast canvas of a shared life, utterly poor, soaked with fear, but full of hope for an imminent happiness for all.
Ludmila Ulitskaya says: “The genre of this book is close to a documentary, but not quite: collage gives it a very special quality. This book has a long history. My first stories came out of my childhood memories; they were published as the “Childhood 49” in the early 2000s. In 2012 the book was reprinted. This time it created a lot of interest, many readers responded, and it turned out that people had a need to share their memories of growing up after the war with their grandchildren, who knew little about the life of older generations (and weren’t very interested). So my publisher suggested that I compile a book of the memories of children from that time. We ran a story contest – and got bundles of letters. They were amazingly interesting; with descriptions of a life such as we will never see again, with kerosene lamps, food rations, gangs of street urchins, bread cards, photos with faces cut out, cruel games and generous giving… At first I despaired, because I couldn’t imagine what to do with this mountain of raw material that just kept growing. Then I realized that I needed to find some common themes and use them to organize the telling: “how we ate”, “how we drank”, “how we washed”, “our school”, “our neighborhood”. The frame came completely naturally: the time between two key events – end of World War II and Stalin’s death.”
”This book is bitter medicine. It's hard to swallow whole; you have to take it in little spoonfuls.”-- Maya Kucherskaya, literary critic
“Lyudmila Ulitskaya has brought the eight years after the war as close to us as humanly possible. If you remove the patina of officialdom from the expression ‘portrait of an era’, that’s exactly what it is.” -- Evgeniy Belzharsky, literary critic
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By Richter's Side. Dialogues with Sviatoslav Richter by Yuri Borisov (2003, 2011)
Rights sold: France – ACTES SUD, Japan – ONGAKU NO TOMO, Russia – RUTENA, AZBOOKA, Spain – ACANTILADO
Richter shared with his younger friend the stories of his childhood, and recollections of his meetings with other celebrities (Britten, Fischer-Dieskau, Gavrilov, Michelangeli, Picasso, Prokofiev, Serkin, Sofronitski, Vedernikov, Yudina, etc.). He explained his vision of music, comparing it with other arts: painting (Ernst, Renoir, Schiele, Vermeer, etc..), literature (Balzac, Block, Maeterlinck, Mann, Ostrovsky, Proust, Racine, Rostand, etc..), cinema (Alexandrov, Chaplin, Cocteau, Kurosawa, Pasolini, etc..). Notes taken during or after these extremely interesting conversations Borisov has later converted into a book, thanks to which we can look into the inner world of Sviatoslav Richter, one of the most exciting figures on 20th century musical horizon.
ABOUT SVIATOSLAV RICHTER (1915-1997)
- The Italian critic Piero Rattalino has asserted that the only pianists comparable to Richter in the history of piano performance were Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni.
- Glenn Gould called Richter one of "the most powerful musical communicators of our time".
- Van Cliburn attended a Richter recital in 1958 in the Soviet Union. He reportedly cried during the recital and, upon returning to the United States, described Richter's playing as "the most powerful piano playing I have ever heard".
- Arthur Rubinstein described his first exposure to Richter as follows: "It really wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Then at some point I noticed my eyes growing moist: tears began rolling down my cheeks."
- Heinrich Neuhaus described Richter as follows: "His singular ability to grasp the whole and at the same time miss none of the smallest details of a composition suggests a comparison with an eagle who from his great height can see as far as the horizon and yet single out the tiniest detail of the landscape."
- Dmitri Shostakovich wrote of Richter: "Richter is an extraordinary phenomenon. The enormity of his talent staggers and enraptures. All the phenomena of musical art are accessible to him."
- Vladimir Horowitz said: "Of the Russian pianists, I like only one, Richter"
- Pierre Boulez wrote of Richter: "His personality was greater than the possibilities offered to him by the piano, broader than the very concept of complete mastery of the instrument."
- Gramophone critic Bryce Morrison described Richter as follows: "Idiosyncratic, plain-speaking, heroic, reserved, lyrical, virtuosic and perhaps above all, profoundly enigmatic, Sviatoslav Richter remains one of the greatest recreative artists of all time."
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