There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby

Introduction

IN ONE OF THE SHORT MEMOIRS SHE’S WRITTEN OVER THE years, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya described a trip she took to Lithuania in 1973. Though part of the USSR, Lithuania was a troublesome republic-wealthier and more European than the rest of the empire, it was not a place a troublesome Soviet writer could go on official business. But Petrushevskaya wanted to make a pilgrimage to Thomas Mann’s summer home (on the Baltic coast) and also meet with a literary editor, who might not know-Vilnius was far from Moscow-that her writing was banned in Russia. She invented a reason to visit a Russian city near the border, then hitchhiked the rest of the way. The year before, Petrushevskaya’s first husband had died at the age of thirty-two after a long illness; for the last six years of his life he was paralyzed.

The trip as she describes it is trying, difficult, exhilarating-but most of all it is a break. Wandering the early morning streets of Vilnius, she meets a woman named Yadviga, who takes her in. The women exchange stories. Yadviga is also a widow: She moved to the capital because her house had burned down while she was out one morning, while her daughter, a grandson, and her husband remained inside. In return, Petrushevskaya tells the widow about her husband. At the end of his life, he was so thin he looked like Jesus Christ on the cross. They cry together. Then it’s time to go. “I take the tram out of town until I reach the highway,” Petrushevskaya’s memoir concludes. “There’s not enough money for a train. Freedom. A deafening freedom after six years of hospitals and steady fighting. Ten more days of freedom before I return to my everyday life, hold in my arms my child, my savior, my treasure. Yadviga remains alone, the dry branch of a burned tree.” A month later, the Lithuanian editor sends her the handsome sum of thirty-two rubles and the Lithuanian women’s magazine where two of Petrushevskaya’s stories had appeared in translation.

In official Soviet literature, Petrushevskaya would remain out of favor for years to come. Her stories about the lives of Russian women were too dark, too direct, and too forbidding. Even her fairy tales seemed to have an edge of despair to them. (“Who’s Afraid of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya?” was the title of a 1984 essay in an emigre literary journal which asked in part why an author who was so far from explicitly political themes should be banned.) The same editor who first published Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union in Novy Mir in the early 1960s met with Petrushevskaya in 1968 to tell her that, in her case, there was no hope. She did, however, write plays, and these fared better-one of her most radical plays, Love, comparable in style and spirit to Harold Pinter’s early work, premiered at the Taganka Theater in 1974-but often these productions too were shut down. Petrushevskaya scraped by with television and radio scripts, occasional journalism, editing, and translations.

Finally, the Soviet Union began to fall apart. A group of writers who had never been allowed in print before began to be published in earnest, with large circulations. “The New Robinson Crusoes,” one of Petrushevskaya’s most famous stories (included in this collection), was published in Novy Mir alongside Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The appearance in 1987 of her first collection, Immortal Love, which gathered her grim, realist tales of Soviet life, many of them in the form of acidic female monologues, was a major cultural event. Petrushevskaya was then forty-nine. From that point on, she was officially a major figure in Russian letters, unrivaled in the scope and diversity of her talent. She has won numerous awards and her stories have entered university curricula in Russia and in the West. Her seventieth birthday in 2008 was a government-sponsored celebration on a national scale. With the death of Solzhenitsyn, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Petrushevskaya is Russia ’s best-known living writer.

She is still also a very controversial one: Many Russian readers cannot forgive the unremitting bleakness (even if it was always mixed with profound sympathy and hope) of her early work; others cannot accept that a writer who has existed so far outside the ordinary conventions of literary life-who once produced a nearly epic-length poem called Karamzin satirizing Karamzin’s 1804 story “Poor Liza”; and who has recently been performing a one-woman cabaret while wearing an enormous hat-has achieved classic stature. The one expression that unquestionably fits her, a Russian critic wrote recently in Novy Mir, is an English one: “larger than life.”

This collection represents a selection from one vital side of Petrushevskaya’s oeuvre: Her mystical and fantastical tales. They are organized into four sections according to the cycles in which Petrushevskaya has arranged them in her Russian books. “Songs of the Eastern Slavs”-dark, surreal vignettes told in the manner of urban folk tales; “Allegories,” including two apocalyptic stories, some of Petrushevskaya’s best known, about the collapse of a social-political order; “Requiems,” an older and gentler cycle that explores human relationships under duress and after death; and, finally, “Fairy Tales”-or “real fairy tales,” as Petrushevskaya calls them. From over a hundred stories we chose pieces with a common fantastic or mystical element, leaving for future translations Petrushevskaya’s early realistic stories; her central masterpiece, the novel Time Night; and her novellas and dramatic writings. The stories in this volume were composed over the last thirty-plus years, but many of them are from the past decade. Most of them have never appeared in English.

The cycles are written in very different keys, making them difficult to classify, but a subtitle Petrushevskaya used for one of her longer fantastic tales, “The Possibilities of Menippea,” points to a common source. The ancient Greek Menippus once visited Hades, and since then the satirical genre named after him has often been said to include visits to the literal or social underworld. These visits are called nekyia, a night journey, after Homer’s term in the Odyssey. Classic nekyia describe travels to the underworld and dialogues with the dead (in the original nekyia, Odysseus drinks human blood so as to talk with the dead); modern nekyia, like Alice in Wonderland and “The Turn of the Screw,” involve extraordinary situations like near-death experiences and borderline states. Time functions differently in these tales: travels to the underworld and other parallel realities occur outside past, present, and future and may only last a few earthly seconds, like Alice ’s dream.

In this collection, nearly every story is a form of nekyia. Characters depart from physical reality under exceptional circumstances: during a heart attack, childbirth, a major psychological shock, a suicide attempt, a car accident. Under tremendous duress, they become propelled into a parallel universe, where they undergo experiences that can only be described allegorically, in the form of a parable or fairy tale. In one of her collections, Petrushevskaya invented a name for this secondary reality: “Orchards of Unusual Possibilities.” Most of the action in the stories collected here takes place in the Orchards of Unusual Possibilities. Characters find themselves in a strange place without any memory of the accident that brought them there. A middle-aged Russian man wakes up in a mental hospital in New York. Another character finds himself walking alone through the winter woods at night, searching for a child he’s never seen. A girl discovers that she is standing on the side of a dark road, wearing strange clothes, without any knowledge of herself. What happens to these characters on their journey in a strange land may be read as a dream, a nightmare caused by shock, or else as a momentous mystical transgression-Petrushevskaya makes a point of leaving room for both interpretations. In “The Fountain House,” the father of a killed girl falls asleep in the hospital, and in his dream meets his daughter in a strange house where he eats a raw human heart. We are allowed to turn the screw either way and interpret the story either as a genuine mystical experience, a sacrificial descent to the underworld where the father exchanges his heart for his daughter’s life, or else simply as an account of the father’s heart attack and his hallucinations under anesthesia.

Mystery and ambiguity are at the heart of Petrushevskaya’s fairy tales: we are always inside the dream. Petrushevskaya saves her best clues to the very end, and often we, like the character, have to travel the entire journey without any knowledge of its endpoint and without any memory of the original accident. The final revelation is always somewhat ambiguous, the screw never turns all the way, and the suspense over which reality is more real is never fully broken. When Petrushevskaya finally points the way out of the Orchard of Unusual Possibilities, the question of physical reality has already lost its vital urgency for the reader and the character. The half-memories of abandoned responsibilities, of everyday existence, lose their grip. All that matters now is the enchanting journey itself, and this new unearthly world, and the people you meet there, some of them once loved but long gone and forgotten.

As Solzhenitsyn revealed to the world the insides of the massive prison camps, so Petrushevskaya described for the first time the cramped Soviet apartment on the night of a white wedding, the danger not just of sexual failure but of the mother-in-law barging in drunk. But in all her work-and in the stories in this collection in particular-Petrushevskaya has insisted on a way out. The women in these stories are mad with grief. They walk around with little matchboxes, claiming that a baby is inside (“The Cabbage-patch Mother”); they decide to destroy everything in their apartments and leave in order to thwart an imagined gremlin (“There’s Someone in the House”); they appeal to alcoholic homeless prophets for help (“The Miracle”), to their dead mothers (“The Shadow Life”), to the sea god Poseidon. They bury their husbands in the forest, on the street before the draft board, or in the past. They consider burying themselves alongside them-and then they don’t. The greatness of Petrushevskaya lies first in her ability to convey the true, crippling power of despair, and then to find a reason to return, as she herself once returned from Lithuania.

She has described the absolute breakdown, in the postwar era, of traditional human values; she has also tried to discover what human relationships can survive. We know of no writer in any language who is working at such a pitch of emotion, with such honesty in even the smallest and shortest stories, with such a profound knowledge of people’s dreams and disappointments and consolations.

– KEITH GESSEN AND ANNA SUMMERS