'' JUST THE PLAGUE '' BOOK REVIEW

' Just The Plague.' By Ludmila Ulitskaya. Translated by Polly Gannon.

In 1988 Ludmila Ulitskaya wrote a screenplay about an epidemic as part of her application for a film-making course in Moscow.

When she was rejected, she filed the script away ; 32 years later covid-19 erupted and she dug it out again.

'' Just the Plague '', published last year in Russian and now translated into English by Polly Gannon, is based on the true story of a plague outbreak in Moscow in 1939, caused by a scientist accidently infecting himself as he worked on a vaccine.

'' Just the Plague '' is an expression that Russians deploy, ironically, when something bad happens. An apartment floods, it's '' just the plague''. In this case, it was meant literally.

When people vanished in Moscow in 1939, the NKVD [ forerunner of  the KGB] had usually spirited them away. In this fearful world, it is a relief for Ms Ulitskaya's characters to learn that their relatives have only gone to quarantine, from which most will return.

A distinguished novelist who trained as a geneticist, Ms. Ulitskaya captures the shape-shifting nature of epidemics, and the way they acquire meaning backwards.

One minute all eyes are anxiously on Moscow ;  the next the race is onto find Anadurdyeva, a people's deputy from Turkmenistan who may be carrying the germ to Central Asia.

Only then does the earlier moment when Anadurdyeva crossed paths with Maier at the Hotel Moscow become poignant.

When the outbreak has been contained, the survivors hasten to leave quarantine and each other. They only want to look forwards.

In an interview included in the book, the author explains that she never really expected her script to be accepted by Valery Fried, who ran the film-making course, because he had been incarcerated in Stalin's labour camps and found it disturbing to think the NKVD could have committed even one '' humane act''.

His loss is the reader's gain, because the questions the book raises about authoritarianism and contagion-control remain bitingly relevant.

The World Students Society thanks The Economist.