The Big Green Tent

A Novel

De: Ludmila Ulitskaya, Polly Gannon - translator

Narrado por: Jonathan Davis

The Big Green Tent epitomizes what we think of when we imagine the classic Russian novel.

With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya's remarkable work tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys - an orphaned poet; a gifted, fragile pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets - struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled. Rich with love stories, intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic investigation into the prospects for individual integrity in a society defined by the KGB. Each of the central characters seeks to transcend an oppressive regime through art, a love of Russian literature, and activism. And each of them ends up face-to-face with a secret police that is highly skilled at fomenting paranoia, division, and self-betrayal. A man and his wife both become collaborators without the other knowing; an artist is chased into the woods, where he remains in hiding for four years; a researcher is forced to deem a patient insane, damning him to torture in a psychiatric ward. Ludmila Ulitskaya's novel belongs to the tradition of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: It is a work consumed with politics, love, and belief - and a revelation of life in dark times.

©2010 Ludmila Ulitskaya; Translation copyright 2015 by Bela Shayevich (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

Suffered through almost Chapter 4 until…

one of the main characters had to turn gay, like it was a Netflix or HBO original. No thanks! Somehow that was left out of the synopsis. Fortunately, this book was written more than ten years ago or else the three fictitious, male main characters would’ve HAD to change in the girls locker room because they were born liking to look at girls undress. Imagine that! I knew I should’ve made a non-fiction selection.

Modern female Russian writer writing a saga starting with Stalin's death and ending with the poet Brodsky's. It also 3 male frie

Three male friends and to a lesser extent 3 female fiends
It is equivalent to War and Peace for the depth and development of character and for the fullness of ideas

Engaging

A fascinating collection of inter-related stories rather than a conventional novel, the book offers a fascinating study of dissident life in Russia in the decades after Stalin's death.

Expresses life's beauty tragedy & unfathomability

Wow. This book is anything but a clear-cut, clean & tidy story with a happy ending. It really made me feel the complexity of this earthly existence. Sometimes everything seems meaningless. Life can be cruel and tragic. But there are these glimmers of hope and transcendence in the forms of poetry, music, friendship, and compassion that are a steady theme throughout the book.

Complex because the story is big

Wonderful book about life in USSR before and after the fall. How rough and cruel life was.Something I don’t think we understand. Even the Playground was crueler.Russia has never had a good government so many Russians look out at the world from a different base of experience. If there is never a good government that’s very different.Then there is the other side, the compassion and stronger mutual support. For me the book just got better and better.Tolstoy. Honest story telling not literary games.

War and Peace for 1950-1970

Fascinating and intricate story line. Some of the single stories are a bit confusing to follow, but overall brings a good and realistic portraiture of society and individual characters, their feelings and emotions.