The Poetics of Mysticism in Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s Prose

We often find the Soviet past at the core of Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s works, and most critics agree that the description of everyday life and historicity are fundamental principles of her prose. Nonetheless, episodes which record the characters’ mystical experiences play a fairly significant part in Ulitskaya’s works. However, they receive considerably less attention in research on her oeuvre. In this paper, the author focuses on the mystical component of Ulitskaya’s novels and most recent short stories and attempts to define the thematic and structural characteristics of the mystical episodes. In the first part of the paper, the author reviews the constant elements of the characters’ mystical experiences in different works. These experiences are primarily connected with encountering death and are based on the character’s borderline position and the permeability of the frontier between “reality” and the afterworld. This frontier is marked out by recurrent motifs, which symbolically bestow upon death the meaning of transformation (transubstantiation) and revival. From a structural point of view, the delineation of the frontier between the two worlds can be explained, among others, through the characteristics of fantasy. In the second part of the paper, the article examines this aspect of the mystical episodes of Ulitskaya’s works with reference to Tzvetan Todorov’s concept, which defines the fantastical as an interim phenomenon between the “uncanny” and the “miraculous”. The characters’ mystical experiences in the episodes examined here receive a rational explanation (dream, hallucination before dying, psychological disorder), which cancels their fantastic nature. As a result of this duality of a rational explanation and the simultaneous uncertainty about judging the experience, the mystical episodes of Ulitskaya’s works can be categorised as “fantastical and uncanny”. When these episodes are examined from the point of view of the properties of the genuinely mystical texts, we find a “profane mysticism”, primarily as a result of the neutrality of the narrator’s discourse, the blurriness of the difference between what is real and what is supernatural, and the proximity of the narrator’s and the author’s positions.