"Girls" by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, summary

This book brings together two series of stories, written between 1993 and 2003, about children growing up in the difficult post-war period. This book is a profound chronicle of the private lives of Soviet people at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s. Personal dramas, childhood fears, naive fantasies, and first encounters with the cruelty of the world unfold against the backdrop of communal living, the ideological pressure of the late Stalin era, and the gradual transition of historical times.

The Girls series

"A gift not made by hands"

In the fall, the best third-graders are accepted into the Young Pioneers. At the Museum of Gifts to Stalin, schoolgirls Alena Pshenichnikova, Masha Chelysheva, Sonya Preobrazhenskaya, and Svetlana Bagaturia spot an embroidered portrait of the leader. The caption states that the work was done with feet by an armless girl named T. Kolyvanova. It turns out that this artist is an adult relative of their quiet classmate, Tanya.

The Pioneer girls decide to organize a group gathering, with the heroine in attendance. They collect fifteen rubles and head to the Maryina Roshcha barracks to see Tamara Kolyvanova. The visit turns into a shattering of illusions. The armless woman cynically explains that she embroidered the portrait solely to get a separate room. She uses the money she gets from the children to buy a bottle of wine for her neighbor, Yegorych. Alyona returns home in tears, shocked by the deception and hypocrisy.

Other People’s Children

In August 1943, Margarita Oganesyan gave birth to twins, Gayane and Victoria. The girls’ father, Sergo, who was at the front, suspected his wife of infidelity with her teenage admirer, the violinist Misha. He sent a cruel letter denying paternity. The shock plunged Margarita into a severe mental breakdown.

Their grandmother, Emma Ashotovna, is raising the newborns. In the summer of 1945, Sergo returns from the war as a victor. Seeing his wife faded and indifferent and his crying babies, he swallows his pride and acknowledges the children as his own. The family unit is held together by the grandmother’s selfless care and their shared overcoming of long-standing pain.

"Foundling"

The twins are growing up. The domineering Vika constantly harasses the timid, sensitive Gayane. Overhearing conversations in the courtyard about a dead baby being found, Vika concocts a cunning hoax. She slips her sister a letter from the local cleaning lady, Tanya Beker ("Bekerikha"), claiming that Gayane is an abandoned child.

Believing her false origins and considering herself the cause of her mother’s illness, Gayane decides to die. Late in the evening, she goes to the zoo, crawls into an empty enclosure, and falls asleep in the hay in the freezing cold. The night watchman and the police find the girl and take her to the hospital. That same morning, Bekerikha suddenly dies of a heart attack. The stress of Gayane’s disappearance briefly awakens Margarita: for the first time in years, she gets up and speaks to her husband.

"On March 2nd of that year…"

In the winter of 1953, a campaign against "doctor saboteurs" unfolds in Moscow. The family of medical professors Alexander Aaronovich and Bela Zinovyevna Zhizhmorsky awaits possible arrest. In their apartment, their elderly great-grandfather Aaron slowly dies. Their granddaughter Lilya suffers from the ostracism of her classmates and regular attacks from a street hooligan, Vitka Bodrov, who pins her against the school gates.

On March 1st, an elderly teacher gives a bold lesson on the equality of nations. In the entryway, Lilia furiously rebuffs Bodrov and beats him up. That evening, the girl begins her first period, which she mistakes for a fatal illness. That same night, old Aaron dies, and the radio soon announces Stalin’s death.

"Chicken pox"

Alena Pshenichnikova gathers her classmates for a party at her diplomat parents’ spacious apartment. Looking at postcards with oriental miniatures, the girls take silk pajamas, kimonos, and evening dresses out of a chest. Innocent dressing up evolves into an intuitive exploration of adult life: the schoolgirls act out weddings, sex scenes, and childbirth using dolls.

Senior second-year student Tanya Kolyvanova tells her friends the physiological details of the origin of life. The party is suddenly interrupted, and the next day, almost all the participants in the secret ceremony come down with chickenpox.

"Poor happy Kolyvanova"

In the fall of 1954, the boys’ and girls’ schools merged. A striking German teacher, Yevgenia Alekseyevna Lukina, the wife of a Soviet general, arrived in the fifth grade. The awkward Tanya Kolyvanova fell in love with her with a pure, reverent love and began following her around.

For International Women’s Day, Tanya decides to give her teacher a luxurious basket of cyclamens. To obtain the necessary sum, the girl endures the advances of Shurik the Spider, a lame pigeon fancier. She leaves the flowers at Lukina’s doorstep. However, the gift provokes a jealous outburst in the teacher’s husband, who beats her. Soon, Lukina leaves with her husband on a business trip abroad. Years later, the now-mature Kolyvanova meets a young Swede, Peterson, marries him, and moves abroad forever.

The Childhood-49 series

Cabbage Miracle

Orphans Dusya and Olga are staying with an elderly, distant relative of Ipatyeva’s, nicknamed Slonikha. The grandmother sends the girls to a stall to buy cabbage, giving them a ten-ruble note. After standing in the cold for half a day, Dusya discovers she’s dropped the money through a hole in her pocket.

Terrified of the old woman’s possible wrath, the sisters wander down the evening street. Suddenly, as they turn a corner, two huge heads of cabbage fall from the back of a passing truck. The girls wrap them in a sack and drag them home. There, they are met with tears by Baba Tanya, who sincerely regrets her previous harshness.

Wax Duck

Rodion, a junk dealer, regularly comes to the yard, trading rags for jewelry and toys. Valka Bobrova passionately desires a fragile wax duck figurine with a dented wing. Lacking her own belongings, she decides to steal: she snatches a neighbor’s drying rug from the yard and trades the treasured toy for it. Soon, the wax duck melts in her childish hands, but the feeling of cold excitement remains with Valya for life. Years later, she becomes a world-famous gymnast, recalling the old yard episode before each important performance.

Grandfather Whisperer

Dina, the youngest granddaughter, spends her days with her nearly blind great-grandfather, who constantly whispers prayers. When her older brother, Alik, receives a wristwatch as a gift, Dina secretly wears it in the yard. During a game of volleyball, a ball shatters the precious watch into pieces. The sobbing girl brings the fragments to her great-grandfather. The old man takes out his antique watchmaker’s tools and restores the mechanism to life.

"Nails"

A boy named Seryozha is sent to a remote village for the summer to live with his stern great-grandfather. Bored, the child takes a hammer and hammers a multitude of nails into the threshold of the barn. The great-grandfather doesn’t scold his great-grandson, but calmly forces him to pull out each nail with a crowbar and then straighten the bent rods on an anvil. This lesson in patient labor brings the boy closer to the old man. Before Seryozha’s departure, the grandfather finishes making his own coffin and soon passes away quietly.

"A lucky break"

The grumpy old woman Klyukvina clashes with her neighbor, Khalima, who is carrying a huge pile of featherbeds and blankets out into the spring sunshine. Klyukvina’s grandson, Kolka, sneaks into the attic of the neighboring three-story building and emerges onto the steep edge of the roof.

The boy falls from a height, but lands right on Khalima’s plush mattresses, escaping with only a bitten tongue. Shocked by her grandson’s rescue, Klyukvina subdues her anger, brings the Tatar family a baked pie, and apologizes for their past feud.

Paper Victory

Limping and sickly, Genya Pirapletchikov suffers constant humiliation from the boys in the neighborhood. His mother decides to turn the tide and invites the bullies to her son’s birthday party. She sets the table, plays classical pieces on the piano for the boys, and then invites Genya to demonstrate his greatest skill — folding paper figures.

Genya masterfully folds boats, cups, birds, and animals. The amazed kids from the neighborhood line up to receive the paper gifts. The sincere admiration of his peers breaks down the wall of alienation, giving the boy his first feeling of friendship and acceptance.