Pavel Ulitin

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Pavel Pavlovich Ulitin (Russian: Павел Павлович Улитин; 31 May 1918 – 24 May 1986) was a Russian underground writer. He was born in Migulinsky, a Cossack village on the Don. His father, a surveyor, was killed in 1921 by White Army bandits. His mother was a highly educated doctor.

Ulitin studied at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (IFLI), where he and friends formed an anti-Stalin Communist club. This led to his arrest in 1938. He was released 16 months later due to poor health, but the injuries from imprisonment left him permanently disabled.

After World War II, Ulitin began correspondence studies at Moscow State Linguistic University. In 1951 he tried to seek asylum at the United States embassy, was arrested, and spent time in the Leningrad Prison Psychiatric Hospital until 1954. He then returned to his hometown briefly and went back to Moscow. In 1957 he completed his correspondence studies and supported himself by teaching English and working as a bookstore clerk. He died in Moscow in 1986.

Ulitin’s early works were lost after his arrest; a manuscript of a novel was confiscated in 1951, and more writings were seized in 1962. Inspired by James Joyce, he created a distinctive style in which a concealed subject emerges through interwoven stream-of-consciousness, memories, quotations (many in foreign languages), scraps of dialogue, and monologues by incidental characters.

Within the Soviet Union, his writings circulated as samizdat (underground, self-published copies). From 1976, thanks to Zinovy Zinik, his works appeared in émigré magazines. The first post-Soviet publications appeared in the 1990s, with three more since 2000 published by Ivan Akhmetev. Much of Ulitin’s work remains unpublished.