Reconfiguring Personal Experiences and Creative Communities as Literary Models: Liudmila Ulitskaia’s Life-Writing of the 2010s

This chapter discusses Ulitskaia’s autobiographical writing of the 2010s. It focuses on Ulitskaia’s engagement with the intelligentsia myth and the construction of post-Soviet memory related to the notion of microhistory. It is argued that Ulitskaia considers reading dangerous texts by banned authors by her and her friends in the late-Soviet period as an important tool for the formation of a learned community of Russian writers, scholars, and readers who resisted political oppression and censorship. The chapter analyses Ulitskaia’s essays as well as her book about Natalia Gorbanevskaia The Female Poet. A Book of Memory: Natal’ia Gorbanevskaia (2014) with a view toward showing Ulitskaia’s self-representation as a keeper of memory, and powerful critic of Stalinism and its legacy.