"Sacred Trash" by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, summary

Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s collection of autobiographical essays and memoirs, "Sacred Garbage," was published in 2012. The author collected these texts over the course of twenty years, parallel to the creation of her major works of fiction. The writer shares with the reader a personal archive of memories: family chronicles, portraits of friends past and present, her professional experience as a biologist and writer, as well as reflections on ethics, politics, serious illness, and spiritual quests.

Memory, family and childhood

The book opens with the metaphor of a shoebox, filled with broken family heirlooms over the years: a great-grandfather’s cracked bowl, a grandmother’s kid gloves, a hospital oilcloth with a brother’s name on it. These material fragments are inextricably linked to a person’s inner world. A tenacious consciousness refuses to discard the accumulated mental junk, in which mundane, everyday trifles sometimes prove more valuable than speculative philosophical systems.

Ulitskaya explores the origins of the awakening of the human self and the boundaries of personal experience. She recalls early childhood impressions: touching a hot stove, a bookcase full of books, and the evacuation to the Bashkir village of Davlekanovo, where she was born in 1943. Family history comes to life through old photographs of her two watchmaking great-grandfathers — Galperin and Ginzburg.

On his father’s side, his grandfather, Yakov Ulitsky, spent sixteen years in camps and exile, leaving behind a remarkable correspondence with his wife. On his mother’s side, his great-great-grandfather, Isaac Ginzburg, served as a cantonist, captured Plevna, and earned the St. George Cross. The author’s family history combined two distinct branches: the bohemian, drawn to high art, and the bourgeois, preoccupied with mere survival.

Literature, reading and autobiography of creativity

The writer cites the family bookcase as her primary educator in childhood. Her relationship with literature was built on the laws of passionate romance: early readings of Cervantes and O. Henry gave way to the discovery of the poetry of Boris Pasternak and the books of Vladimir Nabokov. For an entire generation of Soviet people, reading served as a reliable refuge from the official lies and the wretchedness of the surrounding reality.

The author devotes particular attention to Nabokov’s novel "The Gift." Ulitskaya compares it to James Joyce’s "Ulysses," emphasizing the theme of exile and longing for a lost homeland. Nabokov’s phenomenon is explained by the combination of the rigorous vision of an entomologist with the virtuoso skill of an artist who pushed the boundaries of expressiveness in the Russian language. Reflecting on "Doctor Zhivago," the author comes to the conclusion that the entire world is permeated with thousands of subtle connections, and the task of literature is to reveal this hidden pattern of existence.

Ulitskaya’s literary career began late, around age fifty. Her novella "Sonechka" and short story collection "Poor Relatives" were first published in France in 1993, bringing her fame and the Medici Prize in 1996. The book includes a self-deprecating speech she wrote in 1993 about not winning the Russian Booker Prize, which she later won in 2001 for her novel "The Kukotsky Case."

Portraits of contemporaries and the circle of close friends

A significant portion of the book is filled with recollections of friends. The author creates a poignant essay about her childhood friend Masha Aliger (Enzensberger), whose life was shattered by the suicide of her father, the classic Soviet poet Alexander Fadeyev, and culminated in her voluntary death in London. Another school friend, Lyuba Popova, overcame the drabness of Soviet life through fashion design and became a professor of costume history in Milan.

Theatre artist Sergei Barkhin collects soil from memorial sites and turns it into paint for paintings of memory. Nina Konstantinovna Bruni-Balmont possessed the gift of transforming any official space into a warm home and maintained her noble spirit even after the drastic amputation of her leg. Photographer Christina de Grancy opened the author’s eyes to the Volga region. An essay about Father Alexander Men reveals the image of a pastor who carried joyful faith and was killed in 1990.

Other featured characters include the Tiflis artist Gayane Khachaturyan, the writer’s daughter Irina Ilyinichna Ehrenburg, the set designer Galya Kolmanok, who transformed scraps of fabric into works of art, and the underground thinkers Yuri Sobolev and Viktor Novatsky. Several chapters are devoted to the writer’s husband, the artist Andrei Krasulin. Ulitskaya describes his method of concentrated creative repose, a series of bronze sculptures based on the poems of Osip Mandelstam, and paintings that blur the boundaries between man and the universe.

Science, Dreams, and the Phenomenon of Deception

Ulitskaya draws on her background in natural science. After graduating from the Department of Genetics at Moscow State University’s Biology Department, she worked at the Institute of Pediatrics and the Institute of General Genetics. The essay describes the harrowing experience of preparing histological specimens from rat brains, which forced the young lab technician to confront the ethical dilemma of consenting to violence in the name of science.

The theme of dreams is explored through the phenomenon of creative insomnia and the strange liminal state moments before awakening, when the familiar coordinates of consciousness disintegrate. Reflections on lies draw on the myth of Odysseus, the adventures of Baron Munchausen, and the philosophical ideas of Nikolai Berdyaev. The author recalls his father, who composed tall tales but, at the end of his life, wept bitterly over the discarded plans for the compact tractors he had designed.

Women’s experience, the institution of family and society

Analyzing the position of women in a changing civilization, Ulitskaya calls for a rejection of archaic myths about the demonic guilt of Lilith or Medea. She addresses the Apostle Paul’s idea of abolishing the division of the sexes before God. The author documents the collapse of the patriarchal "Domostroy," the growing independence of educated women, and the profound crisis of the traditional family.

Drawing on her own experience of three marriages, the writer views family as a free union of two free individuals, requiring constant spiritual work. In her acceptance speech for the Simone de Beauvoir Prize in Paris in 2011, Ulitskaya analyzed her book "The Second Sex," agreeing with the need for female independence but acknowledging the tragedy of the French thinker’s loneliness.

An essay on the nature of love distinguishes between the biological instinct for reproduction, the egotistical self-admiration of consumer society, and genuine Christian self-sacrifice (agape). The author notes with alarm the widespread lack of selfless compassion for others.

Civil pain and an era of upheaval

In his journalistic chapters, the author chronicles the ills of Russian society. A visit to the Kursk juvenile correctional facility and juvenile detention center in 2000 exposed the tragedy of hundreds of abandoned juvenile delinquents and the poverty of state institutions. An essay on the Butovo execution ground combines the memory of the 20,000 murdered priests and laity with reflections on historical guilt.

The writer analyzes the American experience of philanthropy using Stanford University as an example and recalls the Moscow saint, Dr. Fyodor Haass. The tragedies at Dubrovka in 2002 and in Beslan in 2004 are interpreted as evidence of the brutal impasse of the Caucasian wars and the threat of fundamentalism.

The book includes correspondence from 2008–2009 with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was in prison. Ulitskaya asks the disgraced businessman pointed questions about his Komsomol past, the privatization of the 1990s, the limits of what is permissible in business, and the evolution of his value system. In dialogues about the novel "The Green Tent," the author defends the generation of dissidents of the 1960s from accusations of destroying the country, citing them as an example of overcoming the pervasive fear of the repressive state machine.

Overcoming illness and religious search

In her autobiographical series "Breast. Belly," the author reveals with utmost candor her battle with cancer from 2010 to 2012. She recounts her diagnosis, two surgeries at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital, chemotherapy, and radiation. Her illness became a profound lesson in her love of life and gratitude to those around her. While undergoing treatment in the village of Ein Karem, the author finds solace in the classical music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert, while simultaneously grieving the loss of her seriously ill friends, Vera Millionchikova and Galya Chalikova.

The final essay, "To Be Nobody," sums up many years of spiritual searching. The author traces her journey from childhood feelings of abandonment, through her fascination with Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, to the semi-underground Christian community of Archpriest Andrei Sergeenko in Alexandrov and the parish of Father Alexander Men.

The writer notes the profound discrepancy between the Gospel ideal of spiritual poverty and the behavior of modern church bureaucracy, intertwined with power. Disillusioned with institutional prohibitions and ritualism, the author returns to a state of solitary personal intercession before God, remaining faithful to Christian compassion and mercy.