His hands fall on her thighs. “One black, one white!” » Two pants. This is all that Ludmila Oulitskaïa took with her when she left Moscow, just days after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, decided by Vladimir Putin, on February 24. “My eldest son has arrived from London. He has a broad vision of things, so broad that he told me: “We have to leave right away, it’s unlivable here.” » The writer and her husband, painter and sculptor, complied. They closed the door of their home and left Russia, with two small suitcases of less than 7 kilos each, for Berlin, then Paris, where we met her.
This departure, Ludmila Oulitskaïa had not anticipated it. The day before, on February 23, the Russian novelist celebrated her 79th birthday, in a customary inter-self. A restricted social circle, “an average intelligentsia” as she says, always limited to close friends from the world of science and the arts. Biologist by training, this geneticist born in 1943 in Davlekanovo, a modest town located in the territory of Bashkortostan, wedged between the Ural mountains and the Volga, quickly learned what writing was subversive: her chair at the Vavilov Institute of Moscow was withdrawn from him on the grounds that his typewriter was used for the production of samizdats – these clandestine manuscripts which were distributed under the coat, during the Soviet era.
The Putin years bring Ulitskaya back to square one
From then on, like many scientists, she entered into dissidence, from which she basically never emerged. Admittedly, the fall of the USSR freed her and opened the doors to success with her first novel, published in 1992, Sonietchka (Gallimard, Prix Médicis Etranger 1996), followed by many others, A happy funeral, women lies, Daniel Stein, interpreter (Gallimard, 1999, 2007, 2008), short stories and plays. But the Putin years bring it back to square one, to this state where one sees oneself, again, designated as a “traitor”. This is still the case when she joined, in 2016, a demonstration organized in Moscow by Memorial.
That year, like the previous ones, the Russian NGO wishes to reward the best testimonies collected by students, from their own families, on Stalinist repressions and the Second World War. But it is insults, jets of eggs and ammonia that await Ludmila Oulitskaïa. His face is sprayed with a green antiseptic product. Facing her: a hate group, created in the orbit of the Kremlin, some of whose members wear uniforms from the Great Patriotic War.
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