The Kukotsky Enigma - FSK - forum slovanskih kultur

The Kukotsky Enigma

Rusija

Milano, 25-02-2010ULITSKAYA Ljudmila, writer© BASSO CANNARSA

Ludmila Ulitskaya

And people are cheering and bawling, they are staggering, hardly keeping pace. They are wobbling and hopping breathlessly. Their eyes are hopping as well, their cheeks are coming off and their nostrils are spreading like the gills of a fish thrown out of water. Their joints are creaking and the mist is coming from their clothes like from burnt manure

The central character in Ludmila Ulitskaya’s celebrated novel The Kukotsky Enigma is a gynecologist contending with Stalin’s prohibition of abortions in 1936. But, in the tradition of Russia’s great family novels, the story encompasses the history of two families and unfolds in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and on the ruins of ancient civilizations on the Black Sea. Their lives raise profound questions about family heritage and genetics, nurture and nature, and life and death. In his struggle to maintain his professional integrity and to keep his work from dividing his family, Kukotsky confronts the moral complexity of reproductive science. Winner of the 2001 Russian Booker Prize and the basis for a blockbuster television miniseries, The Kukotsky Enigma is an absorbing, searching novel by one of contemporary literature’s most brilliant writers.

Ludmila Ulitskaya was born in 1943 in the Urals, graduated from Moscow University with a Master Degree in Biology. She worked in the Institute of Genetics as a scientist. Shortly before Perestroika she became a repertory director of the Hebrew Theatre of Moscow (1979-1982), and a scriptwriter.

Ludmila Ulitskaya can be defined as one of the most profound and far-reaching writers of the contemporary Russian literature. She made her first appearance on the literary stage in 1990s, when she published several collections of short stories, rich in colour and psychological details. Nowadays Ulitskaya is the author of fifteen fiction books (over 4,500,000 copies sold worldwide), of three tales for children, and of six plays staged by a number of theatres in Russia and in Germany. Many of her books are immediately translated into foreign languages.