Big Green Tent, The MP3 CD – Unabridged, January 17, 2017

Excellent! More people should know her writing. Start with Sonyechka and her short stories and then read this. It’s long but full of interesting characters. If you want a window into life in the Soviet Union or Soviet Fiction, this is a good book.

Set in Moscow, the story begins slowly, describing the lives of three young boys, Sanya, Ilya and Mikha who are united together in elementary school by virtue of being perceived as weak in some way. As the perfect target for bullies, the boys each possess a different set of personal skills and attributes but form a united front against the world in which they live. They are positively influenced in life-altering ways by a special teacher when they are teenagers. After high school, their lives branch out and intersect with various other characters representative of evolving Soviet society through the decades of the cold war, the thaw and so-called enlightenment.The author's way of stringing the characters together reminded me of the principle of Six Degrees of Separation (we are all just six people removed from personally connecting with anyone on the planet). The book covers each man's story in a parallel narrative, which can be confusing at times. The common threads are not only the main characters' three-way friendship but the people who move in their individual and intersecting circles. Sanya is the musical one; Ilya is an avant garde photographer; Mikha is a sensitive and caring teacher. Reading the complex descriptions of musical interpretation and poetry was a challenge for me to read so I tended to skip over those parts.Life in the Soviet Union during the last half of the twentieth century was difficult for its citizens who were still under constant threat of arrest or deportation for the most minor infraction of Communist dogma, although not to the degree of the horrors carried out by Stalin. Imagine living in a twelve-foot by fifteen-foot room with three or four family members and sharing a kitchen and bathroom with twenty-five or thirty other people. Such was life in the glorious socialist state. The characters in The Big Green Tent were poor intelligentsia who had to go to the park and sit on a bench in the cold to discuss books, social conditions, politics or just to gossip about friends, for fear of being overheard and misunderstood by KGB agents. The apartments of common people were bugged and regularly monitored which frequently resulted in the police storming apartments and arresting people for the slighted perceived misstep or slip of the tongue. Reading or even possessing a contraband copy of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago could land you in prison for several years.Once I got through the mundane but essential descriptions of their early school years, the book picked up speed and I absolutely could not put it down. It's a shocking indictment of Soviet life, particularly when we consider that the country is now being run by a dictatorial Vladimir Putin, former Chief of the KGB. It explains a lot. The translation is fluid and easy to read, unlike the version of Anna Karenina that I read several years ago. If historical fiction is your thing, then you'll love The Big Green Tent.

The Big Green Tent starts off interesting and engaging, as we are introduced to three of the primary characters—Ilya, Sanya, Mikha—and learn about their friendship and childhood. Several of the opening chapters give some exposition to these characters and their upbringing, and we will follow them throughout the book, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. One of their teachers inspires the three, and they form a bond or sorts. I felt like the first one hundred plus pages is the best part of this novel—there was quite a bit of engaging aspects to it, as it delves into comraderie, conflict, the pains and struggles of school years and growing up.Perhaps the biggest problem for me about this book is that for long stretches of the plot important characters drift out of the flow of the narrative. I found this distracting because it really kills the entire flow, pace and momentum. While the novel is certainly ambitious, it is a novel that also meanders around way too much, shifting in and out of time periods and places, and focusing on inconsequential or secondary characters and situations for chapters.I can see how The Big Green Tent is an appropriate title, as there is a vastness and grandiose feel to the structure on line with a classic Russian novel. Branching off into several time periods and eras, it follows the lines of different generations of characters. It is an ambitious novel. I has an epic feel to it in that sense.I enjoyed the references to the arts and music and literature, and the classics. It pays homage to all of these great Russian novelists and authors.However, that being said, there are too many sidebars and diversions. The Big Green Tent just feels a bit overwritten and haphazard.

There’s a lot to say, which testifies to the richness of this novel. First, the author handles adolescence better than just about anyone in the arts save Truffaut, e..g. In L’argent du poche. Second, she does the same for 30-something women. Third, the whole is wrapped in the dailiness of Soviet Moscow, where, it seems, there were 2 KGB agents for every member of the residual population, all phones were tapped, all apartments invaded and turned-upside down on a daily basis, and, as the old joke goes, “There are 3 kinds of Russians: those who are in jail; those who were in jail; and those who will be going to jail.” I put that line in my first novel, “The Russian Embassy Party,” but cut out what I now see was a very accurate minor drama of a KGB agent visiting an bribing on of the 2nd level characters. They all live in an atmosphere of degrees of degradation balanced by extended families and their inter-twinings (lots of funerals, richocheting marriages,, bouncing bedsprings and groans), and all with reference to poetry, fiction, and music (though they explicitly don’t like Tchaikovsky, and both Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff appear in conversation only nearly the end). You are ;more than reminded of the positiion of ethnic minorities in the Soviet empire, particularly the Jews, who are more religious and more Russian. You will learn a bunch of pre-Lolita Nabokov, other samizdat works, and the structure of Bach. Hats off!

Great book, and like all of Ulitskaya's work, essential reading to understand post Soviet Russia. She writes in a way that is addictive.

I started reading this novel because Ludmila Ulitskaya keeps cropping up as a possible future Nobel Laureate, and I have worked and lived in Moscow, where the novel is set. The biggest surprise for me was how readable & humorous The Big Green Tent was, despite its account of the personal horrors of Soviet oppression. We follow the lives of three young men, Ilya, Mikha and Sanya, starting in 1953 with the death of Stalin and ending in 1996 with the death of the poet Joseph Brodsky, their hopes and loves, which are invariably thwarted by a political system that regulates their lives, where possessing a copy of Orwell’s 1984 or a drunken criticism of the government, can land you in prison or make you unemployable and destitute. The narrative has a large cast of memorable bohemian and dissident characters, all with stories, many engaged in ‘illegal’ activities, especially the production of samizdat texts: as the state circles, closing in on all three young men the only escape is living in bad faith or exile or death; for the Jewish characters Israel offers one route to freedom if only they can get an exit visa. It’s a sweeping historical novel told in thirty chapters, which are more like linked short stories, which jump backwards and forwards in time. Ulitskaya is less interested in psychologizing, so common in contemporary Anglo-American literature, and more in how an individual can achieve any kind of autonomy in such a controlling social structure where he or she is subservient to the state machine. This is not to say that I didn’t care about the characters, of course I did, as does Ulitskaya, but character, in a society which crushes personal freedom, is almost inseparable from the political. The novel is a riveting read to which I looked forward to returning each evening: a celebration of & memorial to all those people who, before glasnost, sacrificed so much to be free, including their lives.

Outstanding book

O romance russo THE BIG GREEN TENT, de Ludmila Ulitskaya (Trad. Polly Gannon), é sobre livros e o seu poder libertador e subversivo. Num dos capítulos, uma jovem, ao invés de mandar o dinheiro para os avós, compra um dos últimos pares de bota numa loja em liquidação. O calçado ficou grande, e para seus pés não ficarem dançando lá dentro, arranca todas as folhas de um livro, faz bolinhas para encher as botas. Horas depois, a KGB está em sua casa em busca de material subversivo de seu padrasto. Revira tudo, e depois de horas, não encontra nada. Quando vão embora, o padrasto espantando diz para a família: “Mas havia um exemplar do Arquipélago Gulag debaixo da mesa?!”, algo que certamente acarretaria em sua prisão. Apenas nós, leitores, e a garotas sabemos do destino do livro. Algo que ela fez de errado acabou salvando sua família.Esse é só um dos exemplos dos episódios domésticos, ao longo de quase 600 páginas, que compõem um painel histórico da vida na Rússia Soviética até próximo de seu desmantelamento. Os protagonistas são três amigos de infância – que se intitulam o Trianon – e suas idas e vindas, desde a época da morte de Stalin. Mas, por boa parte, a autora os deixa fora de cena, dando voz a diversas outras figuras de outros extratos sociais, e com destinos variados.Não são apenas os personagens que ganham um tratamento diferenciado aqui. O tratamento que Ludmila dá ao tempo da narrativa é muito peculiar. Um certo capítulo, por exemplo, pode conter a vida inteira de uma personagem – culminando em sua morte. O que não impede a escritora de dissecar outros episódios dessa figura ao longo da narrativa posterior, causando um efeito de desorientação temporal, que parece cristalizar algo parecido com que ela mesma enfrentou nos passado, quando a União Soviética parecia viver num tempo e ritmo próprios.A estrutura panorâmica do livro lhe dá a chance de investigar a vida, os tempos e o destinos de todos os personagens, até os mais coadjuvantes. É como se todos aqui tivessem um momento de protagonismo e a chance de ir até o proscênio e narrar a sua história.

A little bit booring. Could not finish it. You should be really interested in russian literature innorder to enjoy it.