“The Big Green Tent” by Ludmila Ulitskaya (translated by Polly Gannon)

This contemporary novel looks back on Communist Russia, particularly the years following Stalin’s death. The chapters generously weave back and forth in time, loosely following the friendship of three boys growing up in Moscow. “A three-way friendship, like all triangles, is a complex matter. Obstacles and temptations arise—jealousy, envy, sometimes even treachery, albeit trivial or pardonable. Can treachery be justified by unendurable, boundless love? The three of them would be granted an epoch quintessentially suited to posing this question, and a whole lifetime—shorter for one, longer for the others—in which to find out.” Ilya, Mikha, and Sanya first bonded over books, enamored by their grade school literature teacher, a one-armed veteran of the war. “A small but mighty army of young people had learned the art of reading Pushkin and Tolstoy. Victor Yulievich was certain that his students were thus inculcated against the ills and evils of existence, both petty and grand. In this he was, perhaps, mistaken.” Ilya wound up marrying Olga, whose parents were dyed in the wool party cadres. “It was here, near Vologda, that she finally came to terms with her keen disappointment in her parents’ ideals, in the whole edifice of power and authority of the country she was born in, in the country itself, with its cruel and inhuman regulations and customs.” Her mother, Antonia, even as she grew accustomed to black market luxuries, never recanted her belief in the communist system. “In Russia, all our might, all the intellect and know-how of our scientists, is for exploring the cosmos and making atomic power stations. They just invent can openers. Well, I have to admit, they do know how to make those.” Those radicals who could not consent to support the system lived far on its fringes. “Each of them was an outstanding personality with eccentric interests, rare knowledge, or expertise in every imaginable and unimaginable field, and all of it superfluous to ordinary life…. All of them, except the woman with the diamonds, worked as security guards, elevator operators, truckers, fictitious research assistants, were spongers living off their wives or mothers, creative layabouts who never lifted a finger, parasites, pariahs, and outcasts, all of them equally dangerous and fascinating. It was never completely clear whether they refused to work for the state, or the state refused to have anything to do with them.” Through the course of the novel, all three men must, again and again, choose for themselves how much they are willing to compromise on their own ideals to live within Russia. “But there was less and less time for friends. There were no more school breaks, walking excursions through Moscow with a favorite teacher on Wednesdays—the sublimely obligatory school-day camaraderie had ended. They came together from time to time out of the inertia of habit, but they dove into their little coves of friendship less and less often. Suddenly they discovered that life had forced them apart.”