Just the Plague
Ludmila Ulitskaya author Polly Gannon translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Granta Books
Published:2nd Sep '21
Should be back in stock very soon
An intense and dramatic reimagining of a plague outbreak in 1930s Moscow invites parallels with our pandemic-stricken times.
Rudolf Maier, a young microbiologist working on a plague vaccine, is summoned to Moscow to deliver a progress report to his superiors. Inadvertently, he carries the virus with him from the lab. When his illness is discovered, the state machinery turns with terrifying efficiency, rounding up dozens of people. But for many, the distinction between this enforced, life-sparing isolation and the constant churn of political surveillance and arrests is barely detectable, and personal tragedy is not completely averted. Based on real events in the Stalinist Russia of the 1930s, this gripping novel, written in the late 1980s and rediscovered by the author during lockdown - and never before translated into English - surfaces uncomfortable truths about the current Russian regime and the pandemic crisis. Includes a new afterord by the author.
Ludmila Ulitskaya may well be my favourite contemporary Russian writer. Just the Plague is powerful in its literary construction and moral clarity, not to mention its contemporary parallels -- Gary Shteyngart
A voice of moral authority for differently minded Russians, and one of Russia's most famous writers -- Masha Gessen
A great Russian novelist * Le Monde *
One of the greatest living Russian writers -- Gary Shteyngart
Ulitskaya captures the shape-shifting nature of epidemics, and the way they acquire meaning backwards... the questions the book raises about authoritarianism and contagion-control remain bitingly relevant * Economist *
Unsettling... Ulitskaya's language is as stark as the situations she describes, but she adds colour to an otherwise monochrome palate with outlandish, almost farcical vignettes... This English translation of Just the Plague is [...] to be welcomed for bringing a courageous Russian author and her humanitarian concerns to a wider audience * Lunate *
Just the Plague serves as both a time capsule from a world where the possibility of a global pandemic was the stuff of fiction, and a sprightly parable concerning the infectiousness of ideology and dogma * New Internationalist *
Ulitskaya has a vivid cinematic imagination... [a] masterly balance of the ominous and absurd * TLS *
ISBN: 9781783788057
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 10mm
Weight: 138g
144 pages