A freezing night in 1939, two years after the height of Stalin's Terror. A train pulls towards Moscow. Among the passengers, Rudolf Maier, a leading scientist summoned, reluctantly, to give a report on his research into bubonic plague. Within hours, it becomes apparent that Maier has been accidentally infected, and everyone he has encountered on the journey must be traced and quarantined. The wheels of the state machinery begin to turn with terrifying efficiency as the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, rounds up dozens of people. Black vans scatter across the city. Against a background of political surveillance and arrests, is this a paradigm of routine oppression, or a necessary operation to contain a potential outbreak of the plague? Based on real events, this taut, gripping fiction from one of Russia's most celebrated and important living writers poses profound questions about the balance between individual liberty and repressive state power during a pandemic.
Author
RUS: Людмила Евгеньевна Улицкая Lyudmila Ulitskaya is a critically acclaimed modern Russian novelist and short-story writer. She was born in the town of Davlekanovo in Bashkiria in 1943. She grew up in Moscow where she studied biology at the Moscow State University. Having worked in the field of genetics and biochemistry, Ulitskaya began her literary career by joining the Jewish drama theatre as a literary consultant. She was the author of two movie scripts produced in the early 1990s—The Liberty Sisters (Сестрички Либерти, 1990) and A Woman for All (Женщина для всех, 1991). Ulitskaya's first novel Sonechka (Сонечка) published in Novy Mir in 1992 almost immediately became extremely popular, and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Award. Nowadays her works are much admired by the reading public and critics in Russia and many other countries. Her works have been translated into several languages and received several international and Russian literary awards, including the Russian Booker for Kukotsky's Case (2001). Lyudmila Ulitskaya currently resides in Moscow. Ulitskaya's works have been translated into many foreign languages. In Germany her novels have been added to bestseller list thanks to features of her works in a television program hosted by literary critic Elke Heidenreich.
