“Poor Relatives” is the first book by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. It was published in 1993, first in France, and only then in Russia. It was in this cycle of stories that a quality emerged that later became the identifying mark of the author of “Medea...” and “The Kukotsky Incident”: the line between everyday life and metaphysical abysses is not as deep as it seems. Her heroes (more often heroines) live as if they know some “secret of life” from birth, intuitively, and loved ones most often do not understand the strange logic of their everyday actions. Poor, evil, beloved...