A Russian story with a novel's worth of material by L Ulitskaya

Despite its almost willfully difficult opening passages, at least difficult for American readers that is for most readers of The New Yorker, Lyudmilla Ulitskaya's story The Fugitive is a very good social document, a literary record of a time and place the compresses a novel's worth of incident and events into a relatively short story. But the beginning: why on earth introduce about 6 characters by name, and not just name but Russian names replete with patronymics, and not just that but randomly alternative between first-name and surname reference, especially when at least two and probably 3 of these characters play no role beyond the opening paragraphs and need not be identified by proper name at all? Once you get past these paragraphs and have a sense of whom the story really is about, it's much easier traveling and fine story: Soviet police circa 1970 I think show up at apartment of an activist artist who's just exhibited some anti-Soviet sketches in a foreign gallery (under a pseudonym of course - but someone ratted him out); when the police leave, he gives his wife a sheaf of his drawings and takes off and goes into several months of hiding - and the story recounts those months and gives a poignant sense of the ever-present danger, the ominous absurdity of the Soviet totalitarian state, the will of the artist to continue with his work and the difficulty in doing so while on the run, how his exile changed the nature of his artwork, and how the oppression strained and broke apart marriages and families. There are books on this topic - e.g., Aksyonov's (?) The Burn was a classic from the 1980s - but Ulitskaya's story captures this mood, much darker than the buoyant East European fiction of Kundera - very efficiently and effectively. I'd never heard of her before but apparently she's a well-established Russian writer - guessing we'll see more of her in this magazine in coming issues.