"Our Tsar’s People" by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, summary

The collection of short stories, "Our Tsar’s People," was published in 2005. This book is a kaleidoscope of human destinies, where the private dramas of ordinary people coalesce into a larger picture of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. The author explores the fragility of the personal world, the limits of compassion, and the paradoxes of family feelings, completely eschewing direct moralizing.

The work was published in the author’s personal series “Sincerely yours, Lyudmila Ulitskaya,” which also included the novels “The Kukotsky Case” and “Daniel Stein, Translator.”

Stories of Moscow courtyards and chance encounters

The story opens with "The Donkey’s Path." Old acquaintances reunite in a French mountain village. Geneviève, the landlady, longs for solitude, but is visited by her ex-husband Jean-Pierre and his new family, her devoted admirer Marcel, and the famous singer Eileen. The center of the meeting is three-year-old Charles, who suffers from a severe, incurable illness. When a local shepherd brings a wounded lamb, the shocked child unexpectedly utters his first word.

In the story "The Extension Ladder," the action shifts to a half-burnt post-war barracks. Vasily Loshkarev, a disabled man who lost his legs at the front, masterfully carves wooden spoons, but in a drunken stupor, he brutally beats his wife, Granya. Seven-year-old daughter Nina, trying to save her mother, pushes her sleeping father from the second floor onto the icy ground. Passersby rescue Vasily, the family soon gets a room on the first floor, and the terrible childhood act is erased from the girl’s memory.

The novella "The Corridor System" connects Zhenya’s childhood memories with her parents’ departure. In a communal apartment, her mother, Emma, runs up and down the hallway with a hot frying pan for her husband, then spends years devotedly loving another man. Decades later, Zhenya keeps vigil at her dying mother’s bedside in a clinic, and later, as an adult, listens in a daze to her father’s dying ramblings, never daring to cross the threshold of his room.

In the story "The Great Teacher," watchmaker Gennady Tuchkin decides to learn German and meets translator Leonid Sergeyevich. He introduces the young man to Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and promises a meeting with the keeper of secret knowledge. The true mentor turns out to be Gennady’s repulsive neighbor, Kupelis. At the same time, the hero’s paralyzed grandmother, revealed to be a secret nun and spiritual daughter of the Optina elder, dies.

The story "Deserter" is set in the autumn of 1941. Tilda, a poodle, receives a summons to the front. The dog’s owner, Irina, brings her pet to the assembly point and learns that animals are being trained to throw themselves under tanks loaded with mines. Irina takes the dog, tears up the summons, and hides the poodle with her family, saving her beloved pet from death.

In the story "A Cat of Great Beauty," translator Nina Arkadyevna takes in a pedigree cat named Pussy. The animal has a nasty temperament, scratching guests and ruining things, but the owner meekly tolerates her pet’s antics. When the woman leaves for America, her friend Zhenya tries to find a home for the cat, but after being viciously bitten, she releases the unruly cat into the park.

The short story "Tom" depicts life in the artist’s memorial apartment, where a homeless dog named Tom and a tramp named Vitek find refuge. The cowardly dog is terrified of noise, but most of all, of a dirty beggar under the stairs. His fear subsides only when the tramp is killed by a car.

The heroine of the story "The Body of a Beauty," Tanya Nevolina, is endowed with a rare charm that brings her nothing but suffering. Her school friend, Grina Bas, commits suicide due to unrequited passion, and her marriage to the lame Seryozha collapses due to her husband’s jealousy of others’ glances. Tanya finds happiness with the blind physicist Boris, for whom his wife’s appearance remains a mystery.

In the story "Finist the Bright Falcon," nurse Klava marries a handsome twenty-year-old man, Philip Kononov, who is dying of tuberculosis. Her husband torments her with brutal beatings, venting his anger on the world. After his sudden death, Klava raises her son Vaska alone, and forty years later, the grown son’s features strikingly resemble those of his late father.

The short story "Short Circuit" unites the residents of a building during a sudden substation failure. In the darkness, a lonely neighbor eats someone else’s dinner, a factory foreman tries to find an electrician, the exhausted mother of a seriously ill girl nearly commits suicide in a closet, and the blind old man Ivan Mstislavovich listens to a Beethoven sonata.

Blood ties and family secrets

The section opens with the story "Establishing Paternity." The steadfast Lenya has been devoted his entire life to his striking classmate, Inga. Inga constantly changes husbands, experiences whirlwind romances, and returns to Lenya with new children. The hero adopts other people’s sons and daughters, leaves his second legal family, and uncomplainingly provides for all of the children of the woman he loves.

In the story "The Eldest Son," the father of a prosperous family has been tormented by fear for years: his eldest son, Denis, was born a year before his parents’ wedding. On the eve of their anniversary, the father decides to have a frank conversation with the young man. The news that his father adopted him as an infant doesn’t offend Denis, but rather strengthens their harmony.

The heroine of the novella "Singer Masha" marries a church singer named Ivan. Her husband decides to take holy orders, withdraws into himself, and in a fit of suspicion, accuses his faithful wife of supposed infidelity, disowning their two sons. Left alone and pregnant by a casual acquaintance, Masha humbly accepts her fate and finds a reliable companion in the art restorer Sasha.

The story "The Son of Noble Parents" tells the story of wartime poet Grigory Raizman and his wife, Bela, who lost her family at Babi Yar. Due to her husband’s infertility, Bela gives birth to a son, Misha, with a secret physicist, academician Andrei Ivanovich. Grigory raises the boy as his own, keeping the secret. Misha grows up to be a gifted mathematician, communicates with both men, and appreciates the nobility of his adoptive father.

Long destinies and inevitable losses

The novella "They Lived a Long Time…" describes the old age of Vera Alexandrovna and Nikolai Afanasyevich, who have completely subordinated their twin daughters, Anastasia and Alexandra, to their strict routine. The parents die almost simultaneously. The elderly sisters throw off the burden of domestic restrictions, stop cooking daily, find relatives in Paris, and begin a free life in France.

In the story "…And They Died on the Same Day," the Perlovsky couple, who had lived harmoniously for decades, remain together until the very end. The wife suddenly dies in a hospital ward of a thrombosis, and the husband, rushing to see her, falls dead at the entrance to the clinic. They are buried in a common grave under a double rainbow.

The narrator of the story "The Last Week" unsuccessfully tries to pull twenty-five-year-old Vasilisa, an architecture student, out of a severe emotional crisis. Due to a delay in purchasing medication, she throws herself out of a window on the very day of the arrival of a young man in love with her.

In the short story "The Big Lady with the Little Dog," former theater troupe director Tatyana Sergeyevna keeps her entourage in line, adores her dog Chucha, and takes care of the modest girl Vetochka. On the eve of a trip to Odessa, the elderly lady forces Vetochka to sew two blouses overnight. In Odessa, Tatyana Sergeyevna suddenly dies on the street and is buried in that same hastily sewn black blouse.

The story "Ménage à Trois" tells the story of two widows of the Jewish writer Benjamin H. — his legal wife, Frida, and the seamstress, Alice. After her husband’s sudden death in 1937, the women remain together. Alice faithfully waits for Frida to return from the camps, helps her cope with the death of her only son at the front, and shares a roof over her head with her until her older friend’s death.

In the novella "The Writer’s Daughter," Stalin Prize winner Eleonora raises her daughters Sasha and Masha in an atmosphere of party discipline. Sasha chooses a bohemian life early on, changes lovers, and dies of liver disease. Masha marries an English writer, emigrates to the West, becomes involved in leftist politics, but ultimately loses her bearings and commits suicide.

Road impressions and the search for meaning

The final cycle combines autobiographical sketches and first-person travel prose. The author recalls a trip from her dacha in 1948 with a live duck in a net, a vacation in Gudauta, Abkhazia, with a giant suitcase of pears and the hostess’s instructive speeches about the peoples of the Caucasus, and collecting fruit flies in the Carpathians on the day Soviet troops entered Prague in 1968.

The book also describes the Christian humility of an elderly woman who lost her leg to a bus, a chance encounter with an old acquaintance on the street, and her escape from danger on the Tbilisi-Voronezh train thanks to endless theatrical tales. The author recounts her encounter with an Arab journalist in Paris, Hannelore, the owner of a German bookstore with a cow’s joint implanted in her, a 1992 commuter train ride among drunken fellow travelers, and the celebration of St. Francis Day in New York.

The cycle concludes with an ascent of Mount Sinai with an understanding of granite cracks as a prototype of the biblical tablets, the purchase of an inflatable dog in Warsaw, a fulfilled prophecy with a dance in New Orleans, a New Year’s Eve celebration in a Tver village in the company of a Dutch German nicknamed Chechen, and reflections on the nature of faith, sin, and human freedom.