Dissident Fairytales

My first encounter with Ludmilla Stephanovna Petrushevskaya was on a cold January night, in a shadowy Moscow bar full of antique upholstery and cigarette smoke. She arrived nearly two hours late and took the stage in a purple dress and huge matching hat. At 70+, Petrushevskaya, dissident writer, had reinvented herself as a cabaret performer.

It’s a fitting way to be introduced to Petrushevskaya’s work. Strange, dystopian encounters are a frequent subject in her collection of short prose There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby. Rooms are small and claustrophobic, neighbours listen at walls. People live isolated lives with, paradoxically, no privacy.

Petrushevskaya’s prose is as subversive as her politics. Clipped sentences and lists of objects arranged into paragraphs contribute to a minimalist writing style. These devices add brutality to already bleak and violent scenes of infanticide, rape, ceaseless poverty and an oppressive status quo.

Still, there’s a strong adherence to the conventions of fairytale and allegory. At times the obvious moral of stories such as Revenge and The Father are disappointingly blunt, while There’s Someone in the House and The Arm challenge and leave the reader room for interpretation.

Petrushevskaya’s work was banned during the Soviet era along with contemporary writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. As well as bucking the status quo of the time, Petrushevskaya continues to evade efforts to define her. She’s too blunt to be feminine, too gaudy to be an intellectual.

This is a cleverly put-together set of short fiction which is at times difficult to read, but entirely worthwhile. For anyone interested in Soviet-era family life and community politics, it is essential.

Contact the author here: miriam@morningquickie.com