There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Love stories, with a twist: the eagerly awaited follow-up to the great Russian writer’s New York Times bestselling scary fairy tales
By turns sly and sweet, burlesque and heartbreaking, these realist fables of women looking for love are the stories that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya—who has been compared to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Beckett, Poe, Angela Carter, and even Stephen King—is best known for in Russia.
Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, by people across the life span: one-night stands in communal apartments, poignantly awkward couplings, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, elopements, tentative courtships, and rampant infidelity, shot through with lurid violence, romantic illusion, and surprising tenderness. With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace and shows just why she is Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction writer.
About the Authors
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has published stories in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and n + 1. Born in 1938, she is one of Russia's most celebrated contemporary authors. She lives in Moscow.
Anna Summers is the coeditor and co-translator of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby and the literary editor of the Baffler. Born in Moscow, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
THERE ONCE LIVED A GIRL WHO SEDUCED HER SISTER’S HUSBAND, AND HE HANGED HIMSELF
Love Stories
Selected and Translated with an Introduction by
Anna Summers
This translation is dedicated to my loving husband, John, and to the memory of my mother, Irina Victorovna Malakhova, who taught me to love Petrushevskaya.
Praise for Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
“This celebrated Russian author is so disquieting that long after Solzhenitsyn had been published in the Soviet Union, her fiction was banned—even though nothing about it screams ‘political’ or ‘dissident’ or anything else. It just screams.”
—Elle
“Her suspenseful writing calls to mind the creepiness of Poe and the psychological acuity (and sly irony) of Chekhov.”
—More
“The fact that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is Russia’s premier writer of fiction today proves that the literary tradition that produced Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Babel is alive and well.”
—Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast
“Her witchy magic foments an unsettling brew of conscience and consequences.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“What distinguishes the author is her compression of language, her use of detail, and her powerful visual sense.”
—Time Out New York
“There is no other writer who can blend the absurd and the real in such a scary, amazing, and wonderful way.”
—Lara Vapnyar, author of There Are Jews in My House
“A master of the Russian short story.”
—Olga Grushin, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov
Introduction
Loving Petrushevskaya
Russians have a word, byt, from being, to denote the circumstances of everyday life. In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s love stories, byt means waiting in line for basic goods, from potatoes to winter shoes (“Young Berries”); it means inflation that robs old people of their savings (“A Happy Ending”); it means an ambulance that takes an hour to come to a dying woman (“Two Deities”); it means alcoholism, obsolete ideology, anti-Semitism, poverty, inhumane laws—all the follies and cruelties of late – and post-Soviet society.
Above all, byt means a shortage of housing. After the Russian Revolution, thousands of ruined peasants poured into Moscow. The state outlawed private ownership of housing, and so family apartments across the city were turned into rooms, which then were divided and subdivided until, eventually, there remained corners no larger than the size of one prone body, plus one suitcase. Over time these communal apartments were broken up, and families were moved into cramped, ghoulish blocks of apartments. By 1972, when Petrushevskaya published her first story, the city was ringed by concrete buildings made of one-, two-, and three-room apartments that often housed several generations of Russians. It is in these small, overcrowded, uniform, much-coveted units that Petrushevskaya’s love stories take place.
* * *
Born in 1938 in Moscow, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya never knew family life. Evacuated with her mother to Kuibyshev during the war, she was left there in the care of her aunt and grandmother while her mother returned to Moscow to attend college. Members of the family of “an enemy of the people,” they were treated as pariahs—and were slowly starving. At age eight Petrushevskaya began to run away from her temporary home and spend summers as a street beggar. Her mother returned after four years and brought her back to Moscow, where they were officially homeless. As a young girl there, Petrushevskaya and her mother lived under a desk in her insane grandfather’s room, while occasionally renting cots in nearby communal apartments. It was an unsettled, unhappy childhood, one experienced without the consolation of siblings. And it did not exhaust her misfortunes. For her first husband died young, leaving her a widow struggling to support herself, their son, and her mother all together in one small apartment. She didn’t meet her father until after college.
These seventeen love stories represent the complete arc of Petrushevskaya’s writing life, from her first published story in 1972, “The Story of Clarissa,” to “Like Penélope,” published in a 2008 collection marking her seventieth birthday. The four sections tell of glimpsed romances in their earliest stages (A Murky Fate); of the twisted and accidental circumstances in which families are thrown together (Hallelujah, Family!); of parents struggling to raise children without murdering each other (My Little One); and of mature romances that have run their course or have been realized in a new form (A Happy Ending).
But the stories collect toward a thematic center in the drama of maternal love—the only kind of love that can survive in extreme spaces, the only kind that must survive if families are to endure. In the ironically titled “Hallelujah, Family!” a fourteen-year-old girl seduces her older sister’s husband. The husband, discovering his sister-in-law is pregnant by him, hangs himself. What follows is a tale in which motherhood burns off the abrasions of experience, or byt, only to acquire fresh ones. The girl who seduced her older sister’s husband gives birth to a daughter, and that daughter gives birth to her own daughter. Her mother (the daughter of the girl who seduced her older sister’s husband) loses her mind from the burden of her family’s history and from the fact that her young daughter, now sleeping with older men, gives birth (without a husband) to a daughter, the fourth generation in the story.
Many of these stories portray the redemptive potential of maternal love displaced onto damaged men. In “Ali-Baba,” a childless, abused woman meets an apparently healthy man, a fellow alcoholic, in a bar, and goes with him to his apartment—and to an unwelcome surprise. “Eros’s Way” portrays a prematurely aged woman who has lost her femininity to the hardships of byt, who comes to life when an insane, married man appeals to her maternal instinct. The same story shows a successful mother doing herself in, adamant for her child’s undivided affection while poisonously suspicious of ingratitude and betrayal. “A Happy Ending” shows a betrayed wife reconciling with her husband only after he has gr
own as helpless as a child.
But these are not tidy tales of loss and redemption. The love that her characters are feeling is like dreaming, a passion too complex and mysterious to be named, much less resolved. As with dream interpretation, which thrives in densely settled societies and represents a longing for personal freedom, love’s interpretation in tiny Russian apartments is stacked with too many layers of ambiguity and ambivalence ever to produce a wholly known emotional world.
Petrushevskaya’s genius as a literary artist lies in her ability to make the strangeness of her mothers, her would-be mothers, her once-were mothers, and her other characters worthy of our sympathy in the partial absence of our understanding. The changes she introduces in vocabulary, perspective, rhythm, and intonation sneak up on us, and before we know it we have implicitly forgiven bizarre, bewildering, and often vulgar behaviors and qualities. “Tamara’s Baby” begins with an exposé of a homeless, deranged man who travels to a sanatorium, one of the modest country resorts where urban Russians flocked for a romantic fling, a portion of serendipity, or a private escapade unthinkable back in their cramped apartments. The deranged man encounters a kindly older woman who takes his arm and, surprisingly, takes him in. The woman’s motives for sheltering the stranger are so perverse they cannot be called romantic. Nor does the resolution allow a conventionally sappy reading of two deranged persons united by their common alienation from society. No, the man and the woman can barely understand each other. Petrushevskaya evokes their quiet gratification nonetheless, and leads us to the epiphany hinted at in the story’s title.
“A Murky Fate,” meanwhile, gives us an aging, unmarried, and childless woman who invites into her overcrowded apartment a fat, balding, married coworker for a few undignified moments of sex. Why? The next day, she inspects her feelings and discovers that she cannot live without him, and this discovery, instead of breaking her heart—instead of condemning her to the pain and humiliation of unrequited love—makes her weep with happiness. At first we feel a mix of disdain and exasperation for the pathetic heroine, but by the end we are weeping with her, for her. She believes she has found a semblance of love. Who are we to deny her?
* * *
Petrushevskaya worked as a journalist in radio, television, and trade magazines, but it was as a playwright that she first made her name. Theater companies embraced her dramas, which expressed her miraculous ear for the registers of colloquial speech, from the self-serious, educated speech of the intelligentsia to the hilarity of sputtering alcoholics. As in her plays, so in her stories: Petrushevskaya listened on crowded subway platforms, on playgrounds, in apartments, and in other locales of ordinary life. All the stories in this collection have happened. All these sad and strange characters have real counterparts.
And so Petrushevskaya’s stories had to be suppressed; editors distrusted her pessimism, while official critics accused her of blackening reality. It was not until 1988, when she was fifty, that her first book of prose was permitted to circulate. Her stories contained no scenes of bloody repression, no labor camps, no knocks on the door in the black night—no politics at all. What appeared to be domestic stories of fringe characters, however, conveyed a verdict as brutal as the most overt dissident fiction. In place of the heroic new men and new women, Petrushevskaya offered a cast of pathetic characters barely holding themselves together. Her continual flow of insight into the emotional psychology of late – and post-Soviet society, her collective portrait of imperiled humanity that’s always been the highest object of communist idealism, must have terrified cultural bureaucrats in charge of official reality. For in her love stories, the revolution, having begun with the promise of communal apartments, degenerated and died in those same apartments. The juxtaposition of the fate of her characters and their high expectations for love and respect was unforgiving—and unforgivable.
I grew up in one of the concrete apartment buildings that have surrounded Moscow since the seventies, in the care of a mother who adored Petrushevskaya’s fatalism as lived reality and taught me to read her in the same spirit. When her stories first circulated, the shock of recognition was terrible indeed among my parents’ generation. Petrushevskaya, it turned out, had been writing about their lives; it was their claustrophobic apartments that she described, their ungrateful children, their sick parents, their frustrated marriages.
In college during the hopeful nineties I returned to reading her, and what struck me then was the atypicality of her stories. In Russia’s culture the kind of stories shared with strangers on crowded buses and subways are extreme, the stuff of urban legends, myths, and folklore. Later still, when I became a wife and mother, I learned to read her with a smile, to delight in her humor, her irony, her steadfast refusal to save her characters, or her readers, from themselves.
Petrushevskaya waited for many years to see her first book into print, and in spite of official suppression, she never stopped writing. She couldn’t have kept her talent and her spirit alive on the diet of self-pity. No, even her gloomiest stories whisper their moments of humor, irony, and, yes, redemption to those readers willing to listen. She wants us to be strong, and clever, and resourceful, like the Russian people she loves.
ANNA SUMMERS
A MURKY FATE
A Murky Fate
This is what happened. An unmarried woman in her thirties implored her mother to leave their studio apartment for one night so she could bring home a lover.
This so-called lover bounced between two households, his mother’s and his wife’s, and he had an overripe daughter of fourteen to consider as well. About his work at the laboratory he constantly fretted but would brag to anyone who listened about the imminent promotion that never materialized. The insatiable appetite he displayed at office parties, where he stuffed himself, was the result of an undiagnosed diabetes that enslaved him to thirst and hunger and lacquered him with pasty skin, thick glasses, and dandruff. A fat, balding man-child of forty-two with a dead-end job and ruined health—this was the treasure our unmarried thirtysomething brought to her apartment for a night of love.
He approached the upcoming tryst matter-of-factly, almost like a business meeting, while she approached it from the black desperation of loneliness. She gave it the appearance of love or at least infatuation: reproaches and tears, pleadings to tell her that he loved her, to which he replied, “Yes, yes, I quite agree.” But despite her illusions she knew there was no romance in how they moved from the office to her apartment, picking up cake and wine at his request; how her hands shook when she was unlocking the door, terrified that her mother might have decided to stay.
The woman put water on for tea, poured wine, and cut cake. Her lover, stuffed with cake, flopped himself across the armchair. He checked the time, then unfastened his watch and placed it on a chair. His underwear and body were surprisingly white and clean. He sat down on the edge of the sofa, wiped his feet with his socks, and lay down on the fresh sheets. He did his business; they chatted. He asked again what she thought of his chances for a promotion and got up to leave. At the door, he turned back toward the cake and cut himself another large piece, then licked the knife. He asked her to change a three-ruble bill but, receiving no reply, pecked her on the forehead and slammed the door behind him. She didn’t get up. Of course the affair was over for him. He wasn’t coming back—in his childishness he hadn’t understood even that much, skipping off happily, unaware of the catastrophe, taking his three rubles and his overstuffed belly.
The next day she didn’t go to the cafeteria but ate lunch at her desk. She thought about the coming evening, when she’d have to face her mother and resume her old life. Suddenly she blurted out to her officemate: “Well, have you found a man yet?” The woman blushed miserably: “No, not yet.” Her husband had left her, and she’d been living alone with her shame and humiliation, never inviting any of her friends to her empty apartment. “How about you?” she asked. “Yes, I’m seeing someone,” the woman replied. Tears of joy welled up in her eyes.
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But she knew she was lost. From now on, she understood, she’d be chained to the pay phone, ringing her beloved at his mother’s, or his wife’s. To them she’d be known as that woman—the last in a series of female voices who had called the same numbers, looking for the same thing. She supposed he must have been loved by many women, all of whom he must have asked about his chances for promotion, then dumped. Her beloved was insensitive and crude—everything was clear in his case. There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn’t stop.
The Fall
That summer we watched a transformation by the sea. We were staying across the street from a resort for workers; she was one of the guests. We couldn’t ignore her—she was too vulgar. We overheard her laughter on the beach, at the local wine seller, on the way to the market—everywhere. Just imagine her: a tight perm, plucked eyebrows, gaudy lipstick, a miniskirt, new platforms. It was all cheap and tasteless but with an attempt at fashion. She strained, pathetically, from her curls to her heels, and for what? To look no worse than the others, not to miss her chance—her last one, perhaps—for a little womanly happiness (as imagined in soap operas). A blue-collar Carmen, searching for some seaside romance.
So here’s the setting: the sun, the sea, a new perm, and—attention everybody—she’s off to the fruit market with a pack of admirers representing every breed. At the head of the pack parades a tall one in a heavy wool suit, despite the heat (we nickname him Number One). He is followed by a potbelly in a shapeless tank top; next comes, incongruously, a skinny youth with hippie locks; and the procession is finished by a runt in a tracksuit—he’s obviously there for a drink. Our Carmen laughs shrilly, but not as shrilly or loudly as one would expect—her laugh is not the war cry of some neighborhood whore who invites all and sundry to her table; this Carmen laughs softly. She doesn’t want to collect every male in sight—she’s already got plenty; any more, and things could get out of hand. The tall one, in the meantime, maintains his position at the head of the pack. He’s the hungriest and toughest in her entourage, the alpha male with the most serious intentions.
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