The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Medea and Her Children, by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated by Arch Tait
reviewed by Michael Pinker

Ludmila Ulitskaya. Medea and Her Children. Trans. Arch Tait. Schocken, 2002. 320 pp. $24.00.

Ludmila Ulitskaya’s Medea resembles the tragic villainess in name only. We meet this childless, introverted, fiercely independent, sweetly redoubtable Medea inhabiting an almost magical landscape in which time and memory jostle for attention in seasonal rhythms, stirred by bands of relatives and friends arriving in regular waves at her bucolic Crimean home each spring. Yet these often errant “children” bring affairs that cross her own tangled path in ways both heartfelt and disenchanting. Now past the median of life in what for centuries was a Greek enclave, then Tatar country, her husband dead, an extended family strewn over central Asia, Medea greets the season of awakening love, which serves as backdrop for events unfolding forward and backward in her life. Her husband, a Jewish dentist and one-time communist revolutionary, flits through her mind, as does her childhood friend Elena, now living far away in Tashkent. But after discovering an old letter unearthing a shocking secret, Medea abruptly undertakes the arduous journey to see this one person with whom she can share such confidences. Meanwhile, Medea’s sister’s youngest daughter, Masha, a poet, and another niece, Nike, are both seeing Valerii Butonov, who appears early on touted as a man of immense value but whose sexual attraction later supplants Masha’s appetite for anything or anyone else. When she learns that Nike also sleeps with Butonov, Masha enters a hallucinatory realm of her own as her poetic faculty explodes in incandescent but pathetic beauty, charting an inner journey peculiarly complementing Medea’s outward trek to Tashkent. Medea’s old-fashioned romantic world gives way to Masha’s more contemporary disorientation as the rhythms of life mount to fever pitch before a dying fall. Still, in Ulitskaya’s beatific vision, while love and time take their toll, Medea’s spirit knows and accepts all, much like Mother Nature herself.