In 1988 Ludmila Ulitskaya wrote a screenplay about an epidemic as part of her application for a film-making course. When she was rejected, she filed the script away; 32 years later covid-19 erupted and she dug it out again
“Just the plague” is an expression that Russians deploy, ironically, when something bad happens. An apartment floods, it’s “just the plague”. In this case, it was meant literally. When people vanished in Moscow in 1939, the had usually spirited them away. In this fearful world, it is a relief for Ms Ulitskaya’s characters to learn that their relatives have only gone to quarantine, from which most will return.
At the start of a short, sharp text comprised overwhelmingly of dialogue, Maier, the infected scientist, takes the train to the capital after being invited to present his research there. Once he arrives, ailing, at a Moscow hospital and doctors grasp his condition, the response is fast and effective.
Hospital staff concoct a fiction to avoid panic. Their concern, they tell patients, is merely influenza. A man is hauled off for spreading the rumour that the disease is really plague. Meanwhile another doctor who becomes infected while caring for Maier writes a deathbed letter to the “Big Boss”—Stalin—asking for clemency for his imprisoned brother. A woman turns grey overnight, convinced her quarantined husband has vanished into the prison system. Not everyone is worse off.
A distinguished novelist who trained as a geneticist, Ms Ulitskaya captures the shape-shifting nature of epidemics, and the way they acquire meaning backwards. One minute all eyes are anxiously on Moscow; the next the race is on to find Anadurdyeva, a people’s deputy from Turkmenistan who may be carrying the germ to Central Asia. Only then does the earlier moment when Anadurdyeva crossed paths with Maier at the Hotel Moscow become poignant.
In an interview included in the book, the author explains that she never really expected her script to be accepted by Valery Fried, who ran the film-making course, because he had been incarcerated in Stalin’s labour camps and found it disturbing to think thecould have committed even one “humane act”. His loss is the reader’s gain, because the questions the book raises about authoritarianism and contagion-control remain bitingly relevant.
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