Zulejka opens her eyes

"The novel Zulejka Opens Your Eyes is a great debut. It has the most important virtue of real literature - it strikes a man right in the heart. in the vast process of contemporary prose of recent decades. " Lyudmila Ulickaja Guzel Jahina was born and raised in Kazan, graduating with a degree in humanities from the university there. He currently lives in Moscow, where his first novel, Zulejka, opens his eyes, which became the biggest Russian book success of 2015: it won the Great Book and Jasnaya Poljana awards and has been published worldwide (or is about to be published). In the winter of 1930, in a hidden little Tatar village, Zulejka does her daily work, obeying everything in her old, cruelly harsh husband. They were already acquainted with all the horrors of the new, "communist" system, starving, tolerating humiliation as peasants and as Tartars - but even when gritted their teeth, they always gathered themselves. So "kulaks." Now the "red horde" is waiting in awe again ... and another blow is more devastating than ever. Zulejka, along with hundreds of displaced people, is sent in a cattle car on their way to Siberia by the exiles of all time. Ordinary peasants, Leningrad intellectuals, "late lords" and common law criminals, Muslims and Christians, Gentiles and atheists, Russians, Tartars, Germans, Chuvashes gather on the banks of the Angara, where they have to fight day by day against the state of life and the taiga. . Zulejka, in unimaginably harsh conditions, where Allah's hand may not even reach him, in vain praying to him, finds himself in a slave line, almost in slavery: he will fall in love, mother, hunter ... free man, equal to men.