![]() After returning to Moscow in 1947, nine-year-old Ludmilla moved into a single room occupied by her mother, Valentina, Valentina's father, a brilliant, blacklisted linguist, and his wife, an evil-stepmother figure. Some of the privations described in The Girl from the Metropol Hotel have a distinctly absurdist quality, such as the several years Petrushevskaya's mother apparently spent living under a table. In this context, a story like Petrushevskaya's "Revenge," in which a woman in a communal apartment becomes obsessively jealous of her neighbor's baby girl and plots to murder her, seems by no means far-fetched. ![]() My poor old grandmother lay in a pool of blood outside the bathroom door." A neighbor had caught the old lady in the bathroom and hit her on the head with the ax used to chop firewood. "One night," Petrushevskaya recalls, "we heard screams in the hallway. Breaking the house rules could mean death. They were forbidden to use the communal bathroom, which was heated with firewood, so they bathed with cold water in their room. At night, they scavenged in their neighbors' garbage for potato peels, herring bones, and cabbage leaves. As relatives of enemies of the people, they were banished from the kitchen and had to cook on a Primus stove in their room, when they could afford the gas. In Kuibyshev (now Samara), the town to which they were evacuated, Ludmilla, her aunt, and her grandmother lived in one room in a shared apartment. This sunny outlook seems all the more remarkable as we learn more details of her childhood, some of which read as straight out of the Brothers Grimm. ![]() ![]() "A little warmth, a little bread, my little ones with me, and life begins, happiness begins." "Never have I been frightened by circumstances," Petrushevskaya writes. Her talents for storytelling and for living are unusually hard to disentangle. She remembers how, tucked inside her grandfather's coyote coat, she imagined herself as a baby kangaroo. Recalling her family's evacuation from Moscow in a cattle car, Petrushevskaya emphasizes the cozy kettles boiling on a furnace procured by a fellow passenger. "I remember not wanting to go underground," she writes, "stretching my neck toward the festive sky, demanding to stay and watch the lights." It's an adventure, not a nightmare. Several aunts and uncles fell victim to the purges and when Valentina, still a university student, became pregnant, Ludmilla's father disowned the child in utero-he didn't want to compromise his academic career with an accidental family of "enemies of the people." Petrushevskaya's first memories are of wartime Moscow, her mother carrying her to a bomb shelter in a metro station, the night sky crossed by light beams searching for enemy planes. Her mother, Valentina, came from a family of old-guard Bolsheviks. It's also clear that she learned very early how to lend both ordinary and frightening events the same sheen of magic, which may help explain her memoir's oneiric chronology and fairy-tale archetypes. Born in 1938, Petrushevskaya grew up amid Stalinist purges, starvation, and war, an atmosphere in which conversations with the dead would have felt familiar, even inevitable. As Keith Gessen and Anna Summers point out in the introduction to their translation of some of Petrushevskaya's fantastical tales, many of them could be characterized as a trip to the underworld, a conversation with the dead like that found in Book XI of the Odyssey. Petrushevskaya's newly translated memoir of her childhood, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, suggests that the "real fairy tales" are even closer to her lived experience than a reader (especially a non-Russian reader) might have imagined. In the US, Petrushevskaya is better known for the surreal, dystopian stories she describes as "real fairy tales." Yet despite their fantastical elements, these stories, too, are grounded in Soviet reality: Their characters are preoccupied, as were citizens under Stalin, with food, housing, and violent death. Her realistic work deals mostly with the lives of Soviet women, presenting a picture bleak enough that the stories were unpublishable in the USSR. The fiction of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, one of Russia's most celebrated living writers, can be divided into two categories.
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