“Sincerely yours, Shurik” by Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Nowadays - more than ever- I understand the relevance and accuracy of meaning when one says that the advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.
This is a book I have–surprisingly- forgotten I read once, so this time accounts for my second reading. I have eventually figured this out as I reached the closing of the book. How could I have completely forgotten that my eyes went through the same pages [obviously during my first read I had so dedicated care with the book that it looked almost as new, as if untouched] and what triggered this total amnesia? Hard to tell. I was feeding myself with the illusion that for sure I read some chapters from the first half of the book but not that I also reached to the end of it. It is funny and strange too, as I was immersing more and more into it I had the feeling of ‘déjà vu’ and couldn’t explain it clearly. I had the feeling that I could keep the pace with the narrator and somehow managed to enter completely into her mind, so together we are building up the narrative flow. So, really, what made me delete from my memory that I read the book long ago?
As I turned page after page, the feeling was growing of old sweet memories that were very much alive and the past was now back here with me. I knew why this book helps me in my journey back during my student years when I was – of course, together with my school comrades – young and restless. [My very first trip abroad was actually to Russia, Moscow in the fall of 1998. This year marks my 20 years celebration. Ha! No wonder now why I have forgotten I read the book. ]
This is a story about Shurik Korn, a flawed Casanova [sadly it didn’t fit for the perfect prototype of Casanova] that lives in Moscow, and during the 1980 years he builds a net of adventures where only women are caught and out of which he simply cannot escape.
Although he seems generously gifted by nature [very good-looking, smart, old French speaker, gentle, always ready to help] Shurik lives an unhappy life. He is always surrounded by women, from birth by his mother and grandmother and, later on, during his adult years, he manages to attract only the most complicated types of women, and eventually he cannot break the shield of his loneliness and inner fantasies that seem to rule his life.
I liked very much that the style is simple, straightforward, while also it is marked by sensitiveness and plenty of warm, bitter-sweet, hard humor, now and there. The dialogues and conversations are serious but also non-serious. The main issue to be reflected throughout the book is about the relationship between the son [Shurik] and his mother [Vera Alexandrovna, a very sentimental and artistic woman], how unknowingly he develops a sense of profound subordination to the call of duty [as it was cultivated in him from early youth by his mature, intelligent grandmother Elizaveta Ivanovna] and, consequently, how is life is a loss in terms of living.
There are on display a wide range of shades of so-called love – from selfish, maternal, filial, flesh-deep, spiritual aiming – but also a whole gallery of feelings from the various women – lonely, unhappy, sick, aggressive, depressive, suicidal – that intersects the life of our unhappy Shurik, who is full of good-nature and benevolence.
In all given circumstances, ‘poor’ Shurik is animated by the best intentions and what he does is to heal and help the women that do everything in their power to keep him by their side. Women adore him [mainly by finding consolation in his flesh] and, constantly, need him to solve their on-going issues and problems. They don’t seem to need him for his ‘being’ actually Shurik.
On the other side, our hero is grotesquely unable to say a clear and firm no to feminine wishes and requests. [I lost the number of cases when I felt a deep urge to slap him to help him wake up from his drunkenness and half-blinded lived life]. Because of his tender and sensitive heart, he keeps failing to see and understand that he is being used and simply ‘ignored’ as far as his real needs are concerned. He is affected by a strange inner mechanism [every time he is being trapped under pity and compassion feelings towards women, the erotic trigger engulfs him completely and he proceeds to performing his duty with usual consideration] and this makes him look as a kind of saint devoted to women. Moreover, he always felt that pity was the main feeling that a man could offer to a woman.
There is an universe full of memorable characters: Mathilda, the lonely and eccentric artist living with three cats; Alia, a colleague of chemical college, from Kazan, ugly but very ambitious and determined to succeed in the capital of the promises; Lena, whose honor will save her through a fictitious marriage; Valeria, with flamboyant imagination; Svetlana, depressed, whose hysteria crises bring her to the point of suicide; Sonya, the beautiful alcoholic. All women that cross his path come with their baggage of complicated lives, that ultimately devour him of his own life.
As he celebrates his 30th birthday anniversary [not more or less than exactly 10 years later after his first mental breakthrough] he realizes he is deeply unhappy, tied to women that are waiting to be served, in all the ways, especially flesh-deep, and he changed into a person that he doesn’t recognize in the mirror. He is repelled of himself.
As if a gust by the destiny, exactly at this time, his first and only love [Lilya, a Russian-born Jew that left Russia together with her parents when she was 18, because of her parents wish to return to Israel as long as the visa permits were still easy to get] had a flight stop in Moscow only for 1 day, on her way further to Tokyo from Paris. During their very brief encounter they manage to rewind the places in the city where they used to hang out together, the feelings and emotions that governed their lives when they were only 18 years of age, the sweet dear memories of youth love. But all this is now long back gone. He finally ‘wakes’ up and feels for the first time in 12 years the sense of freedom and joy, same as he used to when he was a child.
There is infinite warm humor, sensuality, wisdom, courage, in places discreet dialogue with interesting phrases to fix in memory.
“Sincerely yours, Shurik” is both serious and funny, fascinating and accurate to present times as well. It is a story of everything, about basic need for love and being loved, about the family and about history, about women and about men that collide and the thread that connects them.
[ I forgave Shurik as he, unawares, showed me with today’s eyes how it is to be drawn to my first trip abroad. Years passed by and too many things changed, but that innocent and joyous feeling of my first meeting is still young. Hope it shall continue to have a long life ;) ].