The Weight of Words

In The New Yorker, Masha Gessen discusses Russian novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya and her work, which addresses both religion and politics. Working through her own struggles with religion, Ulitskaya wrote her most ambitious novel, Daniel Stein, Interpreter. Gessen writes, “The themes of the book—Jewish-Christian relations and the Holocaust—were unfamiliar to most readers in Russia, where discussion of both religion and the Holocaust had been banned for decades.” Despite Ulitskaya’s interest in religion, her own faith has declined over the years. Her next book, The Big Green Tent, will be published in the United States next year.

Read at The New Yorker

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