”There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales” by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Se­lec­ted and Trans­lated by Keith Gessen and Anna Sum­mers

“My stor­ies are a mir­ror. People see them­selves in them. If they see evil, it means they’re evil. If they see good, it means they’re good.” (Pet­rushevskaya qtd. in Guzeva 2018) 

Mys­ter­i­ous, un­pre­dict­able, hal­lu­cin­at­ing, bru­tal, yet hon­est, em­pathic and pre­serving a pure and dir­ect style – these would be some ele­ments that could de­scribe Petrushevskaya’s col­lec­tion of scary fairy tales.

The sin­is­ter en­vir­on­ment in which her char­ac­ters live is con­nec­ted with their thoughts and in­ner world. The grot­esque and dark­ness – made of night­mares, par­al­lel worlds, hell or trauma – are real. Des­pair, grief, jeal­ousy, sac­ri­fice, al­co­hol­ism, loss, hor­ror, hope­less­ness and break­down (of a per­son or of a civil­iz­a­tion) make up the world of her char­ac­ters. Nev­er­the­less, there is al­ways a tiny ray of light that makes dark­ness “frown” for its in­com­pet­ence to gobble up the es­sence of man­kind. Light has sev­eral faces: an act of kind­ness, a form of for­give­ness or an ex­pres­sion of love. Everything may seem lost or des­troyed, but op­tim­ism of any kind never fails to re­gen­er­ate or re­deem a character’s spirit. 

Lud­milla Pet­rushevskaya is a con­tem­por­ary Rus­sian au­thor, some crit­ics even con­sid­er­ing her to be the greatest Rus­sian writer at the mo­ment (after Solzhenitsyn’s death). Born in 1938 dur­ing Stalin’s rule in a Bolshevik fam­ily, she suffered a rough upbringing. 

Her lit­er­ary works were banned at first be­cause of their frank­ness and the dark real­ity they were present­ing, as well as for the type of char­ac­ters in Petrushevskaya’s stor­ies (such as orphans). When her stor­ies and plays were fi­nally pub­lished, she gained a strong repu­ta­tion among writers and be­came one of the most im­port­ant fig­ures in con­tem­por­ary Rus­sian lit­er­at­ure. A play­wright, fic­tion writer, painter and singer (she star­ted singing cab­aret), Lud­milla Pet­rushevskaya was also the ini­ti­ator of women’s fic­tion move­ment in Rus­sian let­ters. She is known for books, such as: The Time: Night (1992), The Girl from the Met­ro­pol Hotel: Grow­ing up in Com­mun­ist Rus­sia (2006); There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Chil­dren, Un­til They Moved Back In: Three Novel­las About Fam­ily (2014); There Once Lived a Girl Who Se­duced Her Sister’s Hus­band, and He Hanged Him­self: Love Stor­ies (2013).

All the stor­ies in There Once Lived a Wo­man Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (2009) have a par­tic­u­lar kind of mys­ti­cism about them (spe­cific to folk tales and fairy tales) that  ap­proaches the char­ac­ters’ psy­cho­logy. The stor­ies are sep­ar­ated in four sec­tions: Song of the East­ern Slavs, Al­leg­or­ies, Re­quiems and Fairy Tales. The book seems in­triguing for the reader right from the be­gin­ning. With a title that is con­tro­ver­sial, the reader plunges into dis­cov­er­ing what reas­ons the wo­man could have had to be will­ing to com­mit such an in­fam­ous deed. Thus, the title seems to be the first ele­ment that makes the reader want to find out more. 

Then, the second as­pect that cap­tiv­ates the reader’s at­ten­tion is the fact that there is no story with the name present on the cover; again, strange! While read­ing, we ac­tu­ally dis­cover that the story we were look­ing for is called Re­venge and that the title of the col­lec­tion is given on pur­pose to sound out­rageous and to give a small fore­taste about the topic of her texts. 

 Her writ­ing is very dir­ect and simple, but it re­quires the reader’s in­ter­pret­at­ive in­sight. She sketches and com­prises the story as if told in a con­ver­sa­tion, with mo­ments when she presents a frag­ment­ary opin­ion about a topic, makes a com­par­ison or a metaphor: 

Upon these char­ac­ters, with a great artist’s great heart­less­ness, Pet­rushevskaya doesn’t waste a drop of sen­ti­ment­al­ity. The nar­ra­tion is un­flinch­ing, brusque, as sharp and as cruel as the world that it tells of. (De­r­esiewicz 2014) 

In the in­tro­duc­tion made by Keith Gessen and Anna Sum­mers (2009), they call out an im­port­ant ele­ment in Petrushevskaya’s stor­ies: the two crit­ics trace down a con­nec­tion between her texts and the Odys­sey:

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… (Gessen and Sum­mers 2009) 

Nearly all her stor­ies in this col­lec­tion ap­proach this way of trav­el­ling to the other world: her char­ac­ters are sep­ar­ated from the real­ity they once knew for vari­ous reas­ons: sui­cide at­tempt, car ac­ci­dent, or vari­ous psy­cho­lo­gical trau­mas. Pet­rushevskaya called this sec­ond­ary world Orch­ards of Un­usual Pos­sib­il­it­ies (Gessen and Sum­mers 2009). Many of her stor­ies start in this world with the char­ac­ters be­ing clue­less about the en­vir­on­ment in which they live. For in­stance, in one of the stor­ies, a man can­not find his child, but he ac­tu­ally does not know how this child looks. In an­other one, a girl sud­denly finds her­self by the side of the road hav­ing no idea about her iden­tity: “The girl didn’t re­mem­ber her name or who she was.” (Pet­rushevskaya 2009) 

The fem­in­ine char­ac­ters are power­ful fig­ures in her writ­ings. They are bound to neg­at­ive emo­tions (grief, ob­ses­sion, jeal­ousy, sor­row or des­pair) only to find an op­tim­istic way out that makes them be­lieve in hope again. One char­ac­ter real­izes the im­port­ance of liv­ing and man­ages to come back from the edge of death; an­other one tries to get help from an al­co­holic home­less person. 

 Her char­ac­ters, both male and fe­male, re­mind of a fam­ous quo­ta­tion from Stalker (1979) dir­ec­ted by An­drei Tarkovsky where Stalker makes a com­par­ison between strong and weak people: 

Weak­ness is a great thing, and strength is noth­ing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flex­ible. When he dies, he is hard and in­sens­it­ive. When a tree is grow­ing, it’s tender and pli­ant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hard­ness and strength are death’s com­pan­ions. Pli­ancy and weak­ness are ex­pres­sions of the fresh­ness of be­ing (Rot­ten Tomatoes). 

Petrushevskaya’s char­ac­ters find strength in their weak­nesses. Some of the weak­est char­ac­ters man­age to make it out alive from the pit of death (as it hap­pens in Hy­giene) or learn to sur­vive in harsh con­di­tions (The New Robin­son Cru­soes: A Chron­icle of the End of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury).

Lud­milla Petrushevskaya’s stor­ies fas­cin­ate with their gothic and grot­esque ele­ments that cre­ate a dis­turb­ing at­mo­sphere. It is the “ab­so­lute break­down, in the post-war era, of tra­di­tional hu­man val­ues” (Gessen and Sum­mers 2009) that she presents in an am­bigu­ous, yet charm­ing way. She re­mains an iconic fig­ure in Rus­sian lit­er­at­ure not be­cause of her gloomy stor­ies, but be­cause of the em­phasis on the bright side of things liv­ing in a world dom­in­ated by darkness. 

Selena Ac­qui

Reference List

De­r­esiewicz, Wil­liam. “Dread and Won­der”. The Na­tion. 5^th of March, 2014. https://​www​.then​a​tion​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​d​r​e​a​d​-​a​n​d​-​w​onder/.

Guzeva Al­ex­an­dra, “Russia’s ‘last great writer’ wants you to em­brace your demons, foul-mouthed car­toons and death”.  Rus­sia Bey­ond.  28^th of May, 2018. https://​www​.rbth​.com/​a​r​t​s​/​3​2​8​3​5​6​-​p​e​t​r​u​s​h​e​v​s​k​a​y​a​-​r​u​s​s​i​a​n​-​writer.

Mar­telli, Sophia. “There Once Lived a Wo­man Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby by Lud­milla Pet­rushevskaya – re­view”. The Guard­ian. 20^th of Feb­ru­ary, 2011. https://​www​.the​guard​ian​.com/​b​o​o​k​s​/​2​0​1​1​/​f​e​b​/​2​0​/​t​h​e​r​e​-​o​n​c​e​-​l​i​v​e​d​-​l​u​d​m​i​l​l​a​-​p​e​t​r​u​s​h​e​v​s​k​a​y​a​-​review.

Norton, In­grid. “Truth Through Fairy Tale: Des­pair and Hope in the Fic­tion of Lud­milla Pet­rushevskaya”. Dis­sent Magazine. 20^th of Oc­to­ber, 2009. https://​www​.dis​sent​magazine​.org/​o​n​l​i​n​e​_​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​/​t​r​u​t​h​-​t​h​r​o​u​g​h​-​f​a​i​r​y​-​t​a​l​e​-​d​e​s​p​a​i​r​-​a​n​d​-​h​o​p​e​-​i​n​-​t​h​e​-​f​i​c​t​i​o​n​-​o​f​-​l​u​d​m​i​l​l​a​-​p​e​t​r​u​s​h​e​vskaya.

Schillinger, Liesl. “Dis­turb­ing the Com­fort­able”. The New York Times. 20^th of Novem­ber, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/books/review/Schillinger‑t.html.

Stalker Quotes. Rot­ten To­ma­toes. https://​www​.rot​ten​to​ma​toes​.com/​m​/​1​0​4​3​3​7​8​_​s​t​a​l​k​e​r​/​quotes?

Pet­rushevskaya, Lud­milla. There Once Lived a Wo­man Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby. Pen­guin Books,  2009.