Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is famous for her unique brand of dark comedy. It's dry and understated, but bitingly sarcastic. Her short stories provide readers with a macabre but outrageously humorous depiction of everyday Russian life. This being so, it's not surprising that her short memoir of her early years is both devastatingly sad and funny. Born into a formerly family of communists, Petrushevskya quickly found herself on the wrong side of Stalin's campaign to terrorize Old Bolsheviks and most other segments of Soviet society. This mean Petrushevskaya grew up in hunger, social ostracism, and general deprivation. Like her short fiction, Petrushevskya's memoir reads like a dark fairy tale. It's heroine is simple, the conflict between good and evil exaggerated, and the story-line seemingly disconnected from any specific time and place. The heroine lacks shoes for much of the year, gets constantly teased by hostile children, picks food out of the garbage in order to survive, watches her family battle for survival (sometimes physically) with communal neighbors, and meets any number of intimidating characters (mostly teachers) at school.
The Girl From the Metropol Hotel is a fairy-tale, but there's no real prince. Born to the manor (or in this case, one of Russia's most famous hotels), Petrushevskaya falls from grace but never really finds redemption in the opposite sex. In fact, misogyny and the threat of rape or forced prostitution hangs over the protagonist's head throughout her adventures.
Below are a few of my favorite quotations from the memoir:
My great-grandmother Asya died from sepsis at thirty-seven, leaving six children. Her husband, Ilya, walked down to the river to drown himself--he was a doctor and held himself responsible. The five children ran after him, carrying the baby; they stopped him on the riverbank.
I was born on May 26, 1938, nine months after my mother's twenty-first birthday. I was lucky. I wasn't left behind in a sealed apartment, as often happened to the infants of the arrested.
I remember living inside Dedya's coyote coat, watching the fire in the furnace through the crack. Dedya spent the journey like a kangaroo, letting me out only occasionally.
At that time it was common--people disappeared without a trace, like the character in Daniil Kharm's famous poem about a man who walked out of his house and was never seen again. Later, the poet himself vanished.
I waited for my mother day and night. She returned four years later.
She used to tell me again and again that it was for me, for my sake, that she left, that she couldn't have supported us without a college degree. For the rest of her life my poor mother justified herself.
Playground rules are worse than sharia.
Next to the wood stood an ax. We weren't allowed to use the bathroom, so we bathed with cold water in our room. One night we heard screams in the hallway. My poor old grandmother lay in a pool of blood outside the bathroom door. Fury's husband, on finding my grandmother in the bathroom, struck her on the head with the ax to teach her a lesson.
I had a doll, but it was small, made of celluloid, and missing a leg.
I tolerated hunger reasonably well; we'd been starving for a long time.
At a certain age every girl had to take her place in the courtyard's hierarchy. This usually involved being passed around behind the sheds.
A mother brought her girl to a board school for sickly children and then left. That girl was me.
In a commune no one is entitled to private meals; it's considered hoarding.
It wasn't real poetry, of course, the kind that spills out of a dying person like blood and becomes the stuff of ruthless jokes.
In my new co-ed class, fifty percent of the students brayed, spat at a distance, looked insolently with unfocused eyes, wore army crew cuts, chewed their nails, and had great difficulty speaking without swearing.
