Just the Plague

Published in the time of the pandemic, this short work assumes an ominous yet ironic undertone. Just the Plague combines terror and black comedy highly effectively. The phrase itself is telling, since in Russian it takes on the meaning whereby light is made of a tragic event. Originally conceived as a film — hence the cinematographic nature of the text — Just the Plague was never released at the time, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, it was based on true events from 1939, when a Russian scientist due to present at a conference inadvertently carried a plague from the provinces to Moscow, infecting people along the way. The response of the authorities — in the context of COVID — is telling, both the approach to contact tracing and the suppression of the truth. For those rounded up by the NKVD (secret police) for quarantine, this was ‘just the plague’. For initial fear of being subject to Stalin's purges turned to relief when the virus was suppressed and they released. Eight out of ten.

By Ludmila Ulitskaya