The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

Translator’s Afterword

THE HISTORY OF THIS TRANSLATION IS WORTHY OF THE notebook of Chekhov’s Trigorin: “an idea for a short story.” But that is not what this afterword is about, or at least not entirely. I first read The Kukotsky Enigma in its debut incarnation, which was titled Journey to the Seventh Dimension (Puteshestvie v sedmuyu storonu sveta) and published in the Moscow literary journal Novy mir in 2000, its place of publication a recommendation in its own right. In 2005, along with millions of Russian television viewers, I watched Yuri Grymov’s twelve-part eponymous adaptation of the novel (on which Ludmila Ulitskaya collaborated), and my disappointment—despite the film’s talented actors and clever cinematography—was not atypical. As film adaptations often prove, there is more to a great novel than the love story at its core.

The love stories in The Kukotsky Enigma certainly deserve twelve episodes and great actors. Ulitskaya weaves wonderfully complex tales with unanticipated turns, and her storytelling has made her work popular among readers as diverse as her cast of characters. Tanya Kukotskaya’s Soviet hippie friend Nanny Goat Vika or Vasilisa’s intellectual monastic mentor, Mother Anatolia, both would have liked The Kukotsky Enigma, but for very different reasons. Certainly, the love story has attracted millions of Russian readers to this novel, now in its fifteenth printing and at the same time available free of cost online in Russian in the Russian Federation. But readers who focus on the love story alone will miss Ulitskaya’s true artistic innovation in this work.

On the odd chance that someone will read this afterword before embarking on the novel and in any event not to diminish readers’ pleasure in solving The Kukotsky Enigma on their own, the only clue to be provided here is that the core of this novel lies in your, the reader’s, experience, particularly of part 2. Throughout the rest of the book, Ulitskaya’s narrator, like Elena Kukotskaya, leaves little notes to her readers to assist them in deciphering Elena’s and the other characters’ experiences in part 2. There Ulitskaya veritably re-creates for her readers an experience of the novel’s fictional reality as if they themselves were victims of Alzheimer’s disease. The process of memory (or the thwarting thereof) comprises the principal mechanism that makes reading possible and pleasurable, and Ulitskaya has given that process a twenty-first-century name.

The novel’s title merits comment. In an interview given shortly before the first book edition emerged (published online in Russian by Tatyana Martyusheva in a posting titled “A Mondial Hodgepodge or The Kukotsky Enigma” Erfolg.ru. http://www.erfolg.ru/culture/ulizkaya.htm), Ulitskaya confessed that she had changed the novel’s title because she had tired of explaining what she meant by Journeys into the Seventh Dimension. Perhaps similar confusion had led Ulitskaya’s German publishers to release the novel as Reise in den siebenten Himmel [Journey to Seventh Heaven]. In Russian, Казус Кукоцкого—the title the novel bears to this day—is marvelously alliterative and polysemous. The first word, derived from the Latin casus (as in casus belli) in Russian conveys: “an incident that occurs independent of the will of any person and cannot be anticipated under certain conditions; a condition or noteworthy occurrence or event or meeting that involves complications; an extraordinary occurrence, particularly from a legal standpoint; a particular incidence of any particular disease or illness; a cause or reason,” and “something inexplicable.” Clearly, the English word “case,” which has been used in English-language references to this novel, does not convey the wealth of meanings implied by the Russian kazus. Neither does “enigma,” entirely, but at least it suggests the novel’s core mechanism and encompasses all of the events contained within it—each in its own way an explication of one of the definitions above.

As with many great novels—including Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, two literary predecessors as “Moscow” novels that are directly and indirectly referenced by Ulitskaya—The Kukotsky Enigma contains so many references to cultural phenomena, Russian, European, and worldwide, that annotating this novel would require a companion publication twice its size. In my translation, I have tried to elucidate references for English-speaking readers without spelling them out, knowing that those so inclined will do extratextual research.

The majority of work on this translation was completed in Moscow, in an apartment five minutes’ walking distance from the Kukotskys’ building (a real place that housed very real doctors and academics) and across the street from the church where baby Zhenya was baptized. Most of the sites Ulitskaya mentions in the novel were very familiar to me; many of them are surrounded by legends and linked to particular stages in the city’s history. Some of the places Ulitskaya names no longer exist, although their legacy remains in street names that now refer only to a memory. Each part of Moscow mentioned adds a dimension of characterization to events in the novel. The same is true of places named in Leningrad–St. Petersburg (Piter), which include the building where Dostoevsky located his pawnbroker’s apartment in Crime and Punishment. Literary tours of Russian cities are a staple of the tourist diet; perhaps someday tours will be given of Ulitskaya’s “Novoslobodskaya,” a traditionally mixed (working-class and intellectual) neighborhood in Moscow that has finally found its poet.

In Russian, Ulitskaya’s prose is, for the most part, unlabored and easy to read. She is also a master of dialogue. The accessibility of her language, though, can be misleading, encouraging readers to slide over references the same way some of her characters stroll past cultural monuments oblivious to their significance, in a kind of cultural amnesia. To the extent possible I have striven to style the language of The Kukotsky Enigma to mirror Ulitskaya’s idiom, and this has also involved shifts to more complex syntax or unusual lexicon to signal disjunctions in the original Russian. American spellings and punctuation have been used throughout, following style guidelines specific to Northwestern University Press. Transliteration from the Russian generally follows the Library of Congress system, simplified for readability. Names ending in the letter i kratkoe (й) are spelled with an i (e.g., Sergei); names ending in the letters i (и) or y (ы) and i kratkoe are rendered as y (Gennady and Vitaly); names including the soft sign, miagkii znak (ь), have been transliterated using i (e.g., Vitalievna), whereas names including so-called “soft” vowels with or without a miagkii znak (e.g., я, ё, ю) have been rendered as y plus phoneme (e.g., Tanya and Ilya). The metric system in some cases has been replaced by the U.S. system of measurements. Place-names have been transliterated, but words such as “street,” “lane,” and “monastery” are supplied in English.

This is the third translation project I have published with Northwestern University Press, and the third that freelance editor Xenia Lisanevich and I have collaborated on. Not a few of the “enigmas” in The Kukotsky Enigma derive from Ulitskaya’s creative choices, some of which are inexplicable even on repeated readings. The translation and editorial team, headed by Anne Gendler at the Press, aided by graduate assistant Jessica Hinds-Bond, turned what could have been agony into an intellectual project, as the four of us have worked to coax out layers of meaning in this very tricky (not to repeat “enigmatic”) text. To Xenia, Anne, and Jessica this translator owes much. Any infelicities that have eluded their scrutiny are my responsibility. And, finally, to Ludmila Evgenievna: thank you for your marvelous work.