Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Songs of the Eastern Slavs
The Arm
Revenge
Incident at Sokolniki
A Mother’s Farewell
Allegories
Hygiene
A New Soul
The New Robinson Crusoes
The Miracle
Requiems
The God Poseidon
My Love
The Fountain House
The Shadow Life
Two Kingdoms
There’s Someone in the House
Fairy Tales
The Father
The Cabbage-patch Mother
Marilena’s Secret
The Old Monk ’s Testament
The Black Coat
PENGUIN BOOKS
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby
LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, including the short novel The Time: Night shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 1992, and Svoi Krug, a modern classic about the 1980s Soviet intelligentsia. The progenitor of the women’s fiction movement in modern Russian letters, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia’s most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement.
KEITH GESSEN is the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and an editor and founder of the literary magazine n+1. He has written about Russian literature for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His translation of Voices from Chernobyl won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2005.
ANNA SUMMERS holds a doctorate in Slavic literature from Harvard. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
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First published in Penguin Books 2009
Translation and introduction copyright © Keith Gessen and Anna Summers, 2009 All rights reserved
“Father” and “Two Kingdoms” first appeared in n+1; “The Arm,” “Incident at Sokolniki,” and “A Mother’s Farewell” in Vice; and “The Fountain House” in The New Yorker. The stories in this collection were published in Russian in Novy Mir, Ogonyok, Literaturnaya Gazeta and other periodicals.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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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 Petrus
hevskaya 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
Songs of the Eastern Slavs
The Arm
DURING THE WAR, A COLONEL RECEIVED A LETTER FROM HIS wife. She misses him very much, it said, and won’t he come visit because she’s worried she’ll die without having seen him. The colonel applied for leave right away, and as it happened that just a few days earlier he’d been awarded a medal, he was granted three days. He got a plane home, but just an hour before his arrival his wife died. He wept, buried his wife, and got on a train back to his base—and then suddenly discovered he had lost his Party card. He dug through all his things, returned to the train station—all this with great difficulty—but couldn’t find it. Finally he just went home. There he fell asleep and dreamed that he saw his wife, who said that his Party card was in her coffin—it had fallen out when the colonel bent over to kiss her during the funeral. In his dream his wife also told the colonel not to lift the veil from her face.
The colonel did as he was told: he dug up the coffin, opened it, and found his Party card inside. But then he couldn’t resist: he lifted the covering from his wife’s face. She lay there as if still alive, but there was a little worm on her left cheek. The colonel wiped away the worm with his hand, covered up his wife’s face, and reburied the coffin.
Now he had very little time, and he went directly to the airfield. The plane he needed wasn’t there, but then a pilot in a charred jacket pulled him aside and said he was flying to the same place as the colonel and could drop him off. The colonel was surprised that the pilot knew where he
was going, but then he saw it was the same pilot who had flown him home.
“Are you all right?” asked the colonel.
“I had a little crash on the way back,” said the pilot, “but it’s all right. I’ll drop you off, it’s on the way.”
They flew at night. The colonel sat on a metal bench running the length of the plane. In truth he was surprised the plane could fly at all. It was in terrible shape: clumps of material hung everywhere, some kind of charred stump kept rolling into the colonel’s feet, and there was a strong odor of burned flesh. They soon landed, and the colonel asked the pilot if he was sure this was the right place. The pilot said he was absolutely sure.
“Why is your plane in such poor shape?” the colonel demanded, and the pilot explained that his navigator usually cleaned up, but he’d just been killed. And right away he started lugging the charred stump off the plane, saying, “There he is, my navigator.”
The plane stood in a field, and all through this field wandered wounded men. There was forest in every direction, a campfire burned in the distance, and among the burned-out cars and artillery, people were lying and sitting, others were standing, and others were milling about.
“Damn it!” the colonel yelled. “Where have you brought me? This isn’t my base!”
“This is your base now,” said the pilot. “I’ve brought you back to where I picked you up.”
The colonel understood that his division had been surrounded and destroyed, everyone killed or wounded, and he cursed everything on earth, including the pilot, who was still messing with his charred stump, which he insisted on calling his navigator, and pleading with it to get up and go.
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