Liudmila Ulitskaia's Literature of Tolerance

When Liudmila Ulitskaia published The Funeral Party in 1997 the novella received the critical scrutiny warranted by the latest work of an already prominent figure in postSoviet letters. The plot, set in New York in the humid summer of 1991, revolves around the dying artist Alik and the crowd of friends, former and present lovers, and chance acquaintances gathering in his Chelsea loft. Booker Prize laureate Ol'ga Slavnikova misdiagnoses this narrative as an engaging failure: it attempts to achieve the impossible by trying to fill the void left by the deceased.1 Not surprisingly, Ulitskaia’s own description of the novella provides an alternate view: “This is a book about a person who has done everything possible so that after his departure there will not be a black hole of despair, but an atmosphere of reconciliation and love.”2 The author’s assessment is more than a commonplace designed to snare sensitive readers— it is a key to her prose and plays, shaping The Funeral Party and culminating in Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2006), a structurally heterogeneous novel about healing the rift between Jews and gentiles.3 These two works powerfully depict the results of misunderstanding and, more significantly in the context of Russian culture, stress the need for reconciliation. Both narratives foreground Ulitskaia’s longstanding fascination with hybrid characters: those individuals who combine different (and usually divisive) ethnicities and belief systems. Such characters and their roles in these two novels suggest the main concern of her oeuvre— tolerance as the practice of acknowledging and engaging the conflicting viewpoints that, as Isaiah Berlin reminds us, form everyday experience.4