New Yorker Fiction 2014

A WRITER'S WIT
Through thickest gloom look back, immortal shade,
On that confusion which thy death has made.
Phyllis Wheatley
Born May 8, 1753

Still Fleeing

Riccardo Vecchio

May 12, 2014, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, “The Fugitive”: Boris, a Soviet dissident, to avoid arrest, flees Moscow to live in the countryside. ¶ Boris’s crime is that he is an artist who expresses bitter political satire through his work. He begins his exile in the winter by spending it with Nura, an old woman who only wishes to receive vodka as pay. Boris passes the long winter by drawing on rolls of old wallpaper. They are later sold to help Boris earn income. He evades arrest until 1976, four years after leaving Moscow. ¶ More and more post-Soviet literature may now find its way into the world. This story seems so timeless because it reads like a “tale,” the fictional narrative of what may have been real events. And like the Holocaust, there is no way authors can write too much about the over seventy years of suffering the Russian people experienced. Their narratives contribute to a tapestry of human history. The author’s novel, The Funeral Party, was published in 2002.
Riccardo Vecchio, Illustrator

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