The Kukotsky Enigma

Soviet life, a version of the afterlife, the results of medical science and brutal political repression, the death of Stalin, and the birth of thousands of infants into the hands of Dr. Pavel Alekseevich Kukotsky, a Russian gynecologist with a diagnostic gift, constitute the rich cosmos of Ulitskaya’s fourth novel, published for the first time in English, in an uneven translation. Kukotsky, also a hereditary physician, meets Elena, a patient, in Siberia during World War II. Saving her from near-fatal peritonitis, Pavel marries Elena and the becomes the loving adoptive father of her two-year-old daughter, Tanya. But their familial bliss doesn’t last: Pavel’s campaign to improve conditions for women, including petitioning the government to legalize abortion, at great personal and professional danger to himself, flies in the face of Elena’s beliefs about the sanctity of life. As the years pass and the family unit unravels—Pavel throwing himself into work and drink, Tanya abandoning her studies and joining the bohemians of the Leningrad jazz scene, and Elena increasingly cut off by an Alzheimer’s-like illness—Ulitskaya knits together these and other loves and lives in a virtuoso segment taking place in an apparent afterlife, a deserted place through which the dead wander unknowingly, but not alone, and not forever. This is a novel of great warmth and scope, leavening precise realism with metaphysical excursions, that will enthrall and delight. (Aug.)