The Big Green Tent: A Novel

This is a long book (almost 600 pages); in a way almost an “epic novel” that you can get lost in. On the surface, it’s largely the story of three young men in the USSR beginning around the time of Stalin’s death (1953) through the 1960’s, through Khrushchev and Brezhnev. It’s the era of ‘samizdat’ when publications were copied and passed hand-to-hand at great risk to the authors and to those who possessed or passed on these banned publications. At some point all three of the young men, who grew up together, were involved in samizdat. So, all were resistors to the controlling regime.

I’ll tell you a bit about each of the three young men. We meet them as best-buddy school kids, serious learners, so they are outcasts and bullied by the run-of-the mill other boys. Ilye is the class clown but develops an interest in photography and becomes the major dissident, making a dangerous living off of samizdat and at times dragging the other two friends into trouble with him. Red-haired Mikha is an orphan, Jewish, living with an aunt. His ambition is poetry and skating until a tragedy strikes. Sanya is sensitive, so sensitive that when he is bullied he has fainting spells and in that he finds a release from his tormentors. He’s a musician, interested in piano until he has an incident that damages his hand. The author never comes out and tells us that Sanya is gay, but we are told he gets excited by pictures of males and that his school-boy experience in a shed with the neighborhood girl who ‘befriended’ all the local boys terrified and disgusted him, so he never tried that again.

But the stories of the three boys constitute only the skeleton around which the book is structured. I’m reminded of another novel I reviewed, Past Continuous by Israeli author Yaakov Shabtai, that follows the lives of three young men in Israel. The story drops in an out of their lives to tell the stories of the lives of people they see at weddings, funerals and other gatherings. By the middle of Big Green Tent, the main focus of the story becomes Olga, Ilye’s wife, and how she and her child adapt to living with her husband’s turbulent life. We also learn a lot about Olga’s mother and father who become extended characters, and in later years, Olga’s and Ilye’s son become a major character.

So the outline of the lives of these three men provides us with a framework to learn the story of others.

One is their favorite teacher who let’s them form a literary club and takes them outside of school hours on tours of Moscow’s dense literary scene: places known to Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and others.

And what stories we read of. We read of a Russian general who has a long-term affair with his secretary. They are discovered, and someone has to go to the labor camp – of course it’s her. When she is released after many years he gets in touch and they start again – 32 years in all! The Nobel prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, expelled from the USSR, comes into the story several times. We are treated to a wedding of a dissident – it’s his second marriage. He is marrying his first wife’s younger sister and his first wife is presiding over the ceremony and making the toasts! We hear the story of a young woman gymnast, plain-looking and with no interests other than athletics (the author calls her a C -), who suffers a career-ending injury before the Olympic tryouts and has no other life paths ahead of her. We hear of Sakharov and Pasternak. And there are many more stories.

We learn a lot about what life was like in the Soviet Union at this time for common people and especially for these dissidents. There are the lines. Some people get married just to get a two-room apartment. (Housing is assigned by the government.) All the dissidents are at times interrogated for days by the KGB and have their homes invaded and books and written materials confiscated. Some, such as Ilye, are imprisoned for a time. Olga’s mother, a famous author, has “pull” with a general so she helps to get Ilye’s photography equipment released. The system wants to force Mikha to emigrate to Israel to get rid of him, even though he has no interest in doing so.

The story is interspersed with historical events, some fascinating. Who knew, for example, that in 1953 during Stalin’s funeral in Moscow people were crushed to death in the mob. In the story one character barely escapes the mob. The Soviet government officially reported that about 100 people had died but some historians estimate it was actually more like 1,000.

The author also gives us some detailed analysis of music, enough that I have marked this book on my ‘music’ shelf. Perhaps she is an accomplished musician or studied music? I looked on the web but could not find this info. Wiki notes that the author, of Jewish ancestry, belongs to a group in Russia that “sees themselves racially and culturally as Jews, while having adopted Christianity as their religion.”

An excellent, engrossing read that I will give a ‘5.’ The chronological structure of the book leads to a bit of repetition because at times she goes back through the lives of the three men. We hear of the reactions to Stalin’s death more than once, and we see Olga go through a severe illness multiple times from the perspective of different characters.

The author’s work has been translated into more than 25 languages and on the web you can see discussion that “Ludmila Ulitskaya should get the Nobel Prize.”

One of the best books that I have read

Page turner. Recommend it to everybody who wants to learn how is life in a terroristic society in general and how people struggled in the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

Brilliant book about people in Soviet Russia - survival of an individual under the crashing socialist ideology..
it reminded me "We the leaving" by Ayn Rand, one generation apart from of Ayn Rand's heroes.
Almost documentary of souls' lives and deaths.