Moscow rules
Just the Plague. By Ludmila Ulitskaya. Translated by Polly Gannon. Granta; 144 pages: £9.99
In 1988 ludmila ulitskaya wrote a screenplay about an epidemic as part of her application for a filmmaking course in Moscow. When she was rejected, she filed the script away; 32 years later covid19 erupted and she dug it out again. “Just the Plague”, published last year in Russian and now translated into English by Polly Gannon, is based on the true story of a plague outbreak in Moscow in 1939, caused by a scientist accidentally infecting himself as he worked on a vaccine.
“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 nkvd (forerunner of the kgb) 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. The job of rounding up those who have potentially been exposed is entrusted to the nkvd, whose boss—modelled on the infamous Lavrenty Beria—boasts of his ability to draw up lists and “liquidate” when necessary. “No, no, we’re only talking about quarantine,” the health commissar corrects him hastily.
Hospital staff concoct a fiction to avoid panic. Their concern, they tell patients, is merely influenza. A man is hauled off for spreading the (accurate) 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 poor old woman wolfs down the buttery porridge served to her in quarantine and is “absolutely contented”.
A distinguished novelist who trained as a geneticist, Ms Ulitskaya captures the shapeshifting 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. When the outbreak has been contained, the survivors hasten to leave quarantine and each other. They only want to look forwards.
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 filmmaking course, because he had been incarcerated in Stalin’s labour camps and found it disturbing to think the nkvd could have committed even one “humane act”. His loss is the reader’s gain, because the questions the book raises about authoritarianism and contagioncontrol remain bitingly relevant. n