Deborah Treisman

That was Ha Nong, Reading the Fugitive, by Lyudmila Uletskaya, translated from the Russian by Bela Shaevich.

The story appeared in The New Yorker in May of 2014 and was included in a translation by Polly Gannon in Uletskaya's novel The Big Green Tent, which was published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in 2015.

Comprehensive.

Speculative.

Insightful.

Profound.

Wide-ranging.

So, Han, the story, when you first read it, feels almost like a kind of lighthearted romp.

It's so pleasurable to read.

It's so funny.

And then you step back and you look at each detail and see just how kind of miserable and bleak a lot of it is.

And it obviously, you know, doesn't paint a beautiful picture of life in the Soviet Union.

If you had to say, you know, what's going on here, would you call this realism?

Would you call it satire?

How would you classify this story?

Yeah.

I think a lot of that comes also from just the narrative voice, you know.

It's not a first-person story.

It's third-person.

And we never have an identified narrator because we jump around.