I will start my notes on the occasion of reading a book of stories by Lyudmila Ulytska Our royal people (Publishing house Humanitas FictionBucharest, 2023) by confession.

I’m not the kind of reader who spends a lot of time in a bookstore. I don’t look very carefully at books before I buy them. After looking closely enough at the websites of the main publishing houses in Romania (only they currently have the financial power to sell their products in the traditional way, the others are forced to do so exclusively online), being relatively up-to-date, I usually know in advance what I want to buy. Of course, surprises are not excluded.

Therefore, I was happy in advance when I learned that the new book of the writer, who was born in the former Soviet Union and who has been living in Berlin since 2022, has been translated Humanitas Fiction and not by anyone, but by two first-hand translators. It’s about Gabriela Russo and Luana Sheeda. I was even more delighted when I saw the volume on the shelf. I knew it was a tom small proseas they preferred to say at the time when I was a student, even then The story is the fate of the epic structurethe book of our great teacher Theory of literature, by the late Ion Vlad, was something that had to be read by itself. It is not mandatory in itself.

I also knew that Ulytskaya, who is known and appreciated especially for her novels, has repeatedly stated that she feels most comfortable as a writer in the short story genre.

The title of the book confused me a bit. Since I’ve been reading a lot lately OPstories, the main character of which is Putin, I thought that it would be about people’s lives during the time of the new and bloody tsar. I was wrong. In the stories of Our royal people Stalin and Khrushchev are mentioned several times, but never Putin. Stalin and Khrushchev were also tsars in their own way, even if no one dared to call them such during their reigns for reasons of ideology and class struggle. Also, the names of the secret police appear in the stories, they talk about deprivation, and about hard life, and about life together, which utility company about which Bulgakov was one of the first to write in a play Zoika’s houseand about the secret police, and about surveillance, and about denunciations, and about the terrible Black Volga, and about the disappearance or free ends, that is, the loss of one-day functions, and about anti-Jewish persecution. That is, about how communist leaders understood how to behave. As absolute dictators. Like countries.

Countries that still couldn’t control everything. How Ulytska is located –et pour cause- like Tolstoy, Chekhov or Nabokov, some of the heroes of his stories are called, for example, Genevaiswill be, they know French and German, but do not feel at home when they speak English. For example, in the story entitled Great Teacherthe story inserted in the first part of the book, which bears the very title of the volume, a sequence of extraordinary variety, a certain Gennady Tutsykin begins to study German, becomes fascinated by the philosophy of Steiner and, in the end, discovers or, rather, rediscovers , The Fifth Gospel, a book that was also in his grandmother’s possession. The stories of this first part are full of dogs and cats (cf. Feline beauty or for me), it’s also full of different people who react differently to a Short circuit.

By the way, Lyudmila Ulytska’s great art is portraiture. A portrait made most often empathically, with condescension. The critic was right when he said that the writer seemed to caress her characters. He comforts them even when they quarrel. Most often, the characters are ordinary people. It seems that the author prefers clerks and nurses. And if the narrator claps others on the shoulder, it is most often perceived ironically. Nice irony.

The second sequence of the book is called The secret of blood. It contains only four stories named Establishing paternity, The eldest son, Korista Masha, is the son of parents with a noble soul. They are about simple families, each of which has what it calls itself skeletons in the closet. That is, a child who is not the registered father of the father, men with two wives, women who until now were considered righteous and who were unexpectedly entered into the catalog as “Magdalene without a trace of repentance”.

IN And they liveda lot..the third sequence of the volume, we also find the story entitled mThis isSuddenly to trois like some dealing with the long-lived. In the story that gives the title to the sequence, as well as in the title And they died that day.. it’s about families, about husbands and wives, whom life favors without forcing them to experience the suffering caused by the loss of a partner. IN The writer’s daughter we meet Eleanor, a Stalin Prize-winning writer, a highly disciplined, infected woman who actually has two daughters. Sasha and Masha. From different men. Masha is the daughter of someone who “belonged to the type of tyrants that proliferated during the Soviet regime.” He was both a communist and an alcoholic. Sasha becomes an alcoholic. The storyteller’s focus is on Masha’s fate, her friendship with Vorobyov, transformations in her life. Something is said about the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and about Eleonoria’s social disintegration, and about Sasha’s death, and then about Masha’s suicide.

The fourth part of the book, no Guardian Angel contains the shortest texts. One of them is called Moscow – Podrezkovo. It is written according to the pattern of the known Moscow – Petushki Erofeeva.

I started notes about Our royal people with a confession I will finish them symmetrically. Until the 80s of the last century, there were many, many works of Soviet drama in the repertoires of our theaters. Currency restrictions no longer allowed to buy plays of Western drama, and these works by Arbuzov, Zorin, Rostsyn, Gelman, and others. became manna. They talked about people, not about party issues. And since the title was repeated in several theaters, it was naturally not easy to say something new and intelligent every time. All theater critics repeated that it was realized in them Chrestomatization of the Slavic soul.

Lyudmila Ulytska does approximately the same in the volume Our royal people. He carries out the khrestomatization of the Slavic soul.

2. Higher vices

The Parisian bookseller, the main character of the American Carrie Maher’s novel of the same name, once existed. Her civil registration name was Sylvia Beach, she was American-born, and in 1919, in Paris, which was still marked by the scars of the Great War, she had the brilliant, brilliant, daring idea to open a small bookshop whose shelves there were only books in English. The bookstore was baptized Shakespeare and company, it sold books like any other bookshop, it also had a rental service, it fell on hard times and lasted until the early years of the Second World War, its closure was closely linked to the tragic moment represented by the fall of Paris and the occupation of France Only Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and company it means much more than that. This is an important moment in the history of literature. Two names are confused with the avatars of the appearance of the novel Odysseus.

In 1951, not far from where Sylvia Beach’s bookstore operated, another American, perhaps not coincidentally named Whitman, George Whitman, opened a similar bookstore. Which in 1964, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, he renamed Shakespeare and company. Naturally, the main beneficiaries of the bookstore, created by a brilliant American entrepreneur, should have been, and were, the English-speaking French. However, many Americans who spent short or long stays in the city that Hemingway, himself a faithful patron of the bookstore, considered a holiday, also used its services. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Irishmen James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the already mentioned Hemingway in the years when he was making his way to literary fame, but also the great names of French literature. From Paul Valery and Valery Larbeau to Jules Romens and Andre Gide. But most likely, as I said, the main credit goes to Sylvia Beach, her friend Adrienne, the bookstore Shakespeare and companyconsists in high-risk editing of a masterpiece Odysseus Joyce. And this at a time when excerpts, published separately in magazines overseas, were accompanied by serious accusations made by the still adored People from Dublin or Portrait of the artist in his youth. In 1937 and 1938, respectively, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach were awarded the Legion of Honor.

These are, generally speaking, raw facts, historically confirmed, detailed in books, one signed by Sylvia Beach, the other by Adrienne Monnier, which are the starting point of the novel. Bookstore from Paris. Published in English in 2021, quickly recognized by important literary awards and already translated into 15 languages, translated into Romanian and annotated by Rodica Štefan and appeared in early autumn 2023 in the collection Denise shelf Bucharest publishing house Humanitas. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro