There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby is the title of selected stories by one of Russia’s most outstanding contemporary fiction writers. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is a writer of short stories, novels and plays, winner of prestigious literary prizes. Ludmilla is dear and her stories will leave you with a sense of magic. There is humor as well as the satisfaction that comes when an author can convey all our disappointments and consolations.
Selected and translated by Keith Gessen (author of All The Sad Young Literary Men) and Anna Summers (a Boston scholar of Slavic literature), their introduction provides you with the story of Ludmilla’s struggle to become a writer with critics considering her stories to be too dark and grim. In There Once Lived a Woman almost every story is a form of nekyia: “Characters depart from physical reality under exceptional circumstances: during a heart attack, child birth, a major psychological shock, a suicide attempt, a car accident” (xi).
Liesl Schillinger, writing for The New York Times Book Review, comments:
The stories in this exquisite collection — vital, eerie and freighted with the moral messages that attend all cautionary tales — reflect only one of Petrushevskaya’s many modes of expression. Readers who would like to experience others can turn to another story collection, “Immortal Love,” and her short novel “The Time: Night,” which were both translated into English in the 1990s. In those books, writing expansively, even garrulously, she conveyed the rough texture of life (mostly for women) in Soviet and post-Soviet society, showing the world she observed and overheard in all its unairbrushed detail — the poverty, the alcoholism, the illnesses, the cramped living conditions, the disappointed parents and worthless children, the unreliable suitors and resigned women. Russians long ago put a name to this sort of grim, neorealist writing, which has flourished since glasnost put an end to the enforced optimism of the Soviet period. They call it chernukha — from the word cherny, which means “black” — suggesting a pessimistic sensibility.
Lately, chernukha has fallen out of vogue with Russians who seek escape from reality in their reading. But Gessen and Summers have chosen shrewdly. In these beautifully translated pages, they deliver savory tastes of Petrushevskaya’s dark perspective, but in portions so small and distinct that the chernukha seasons rather than overwhelms them. We are left hungry for more.
Indeed, after reading a few stories last night, I was left hungry. So much that while sleeping my brain entertained me with fantastical dreams that were a little scary, but pleasantly so. I awoke with excitement and remembered that the woman who was following me through the corridors as I frantically locked seven doors–thinking that this divine investment of time would certainly keep this grave woman with a deep voice away–was Ludmilla in her unforgettable hat.
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