Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has experienced her fair share of hardship. She was born in Moscow in 1938 at the same time her mother’s relatives were being rounded up and arrested or shot for being Old Bolsheviks. Stalin’s purges were ever present for most of her childhood, as was hunger and poverty, exacerbated by her father deserting the family when she was young. In the mid-forties, when the family was starving, she was sent to an orphanage until her mother could provide again. In a 1992-93 interview with Sally Baird featured in Voices of Russian Literature (1999), Petrushevskaya speaks of “all the circles of hell” she had been through up until the age of ten. Moving back to Moscow, home-life continued to be difficult, as for eight years she shared a twelve-square-metre room with her mother and grandfather. This “mini-Gulag” was all that remained of her grandfather’s flat. A former professor of linguistics, he had fallen out of favour with the Party and was stripped of his post and his pension, leaving the family with even less to live on. Her means of escape was the local library where she stayed until it closed. It inculcated in her a love of books, but also cut her off from the kids who played on the street.

This tragedy, alongside her father’s walkout, explains the predominance of tough but beleaguered women having to cope without male help, or worse, with male oppression. ‘…those years of struggle and loneliness opened my eyes,’ she said. ‘I felt the life of ordinary people enter me and demand some outlet.’

Biographers frequently resort to specious comparisons between life and art when examining the mystery-gaps in a writer’s life-story. Petrushevskaya has talked candidly about her past and so leaves no gaps, but it is interesting to cross-reference her life and work to find the intersections, those experiences she has developed into her chosen backdrops and themes: privation and suffering, family tension and claustrophobia, exclusion from society. “I’ve always wanted my work to shock, to strike, to wound the spiritual users of my work — to set in motion the process of forming the pearl inside them,” she told Baird. “A pearl’s life can only begin with a trauma, a blow.” She received another blow when her first husband died at thirty-two after a six-year debilitating illness, leaving her to bring up her young son alone. This tragedy, alongside her father’s walkout, explains the predominance of tough but beleaguered women having to cope without male help, or worse, with male oppression. “…those years of struggle and loneliness opened my eyes,” she said. “I felt the life of ordinary people enter me and demand some outlet.”

That outlet was of course writing, but success was long in coming. She received her first break with two stories published in the Leningrad magazine Avrora. She produced more stories, but only a few were accepted by editors. She was too risky. It was 1969 when she submitted to Novy mir, a journal which had earned critical plaudits by daringly publishing Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. But this was seven years later and the tide had changed. The truth was out about Stalin’s camps but the temporary Thaw was over. The “de-Stalinisation” programme, intrinsic to the Khrushchev era, was abandoned, and writers peddling anti-Stalinist criticism were reined in. The editor of Novy mir, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, recognised Petrushevskaya’s talent but wouldn’t dare touch her. Yet he was loath to abandon her completely. Put to the side rather than binned, he wrote “Withhold publication, but don’t lose track of the author.” She had to wait over twenty years until they published her first work for them, the story “Our Circle.”

In the meantime she kept her hand in at writing. She became a dramatist and attended low-key productions of her plays in private clubs and apartments. She wrote to Chernenko and appealed to him to have her plays staged legally but was refused. (Bulgakov had better luck when writing to Stalin in the thirties, but in criticising the regime had to make do with sly digs rather than overt punches.) By the mid-eighties, glasnost under Gorbachev saw a lifting of the bans clamped on creative works and a freeing of the restrictions placed on writers during the Chernenko years. Petrushevskaya’s work began to emerge from the underground. Her play Three Girls in Blue was shown not only to a packed theatre but a mainstream one. With fiction her breakthrough came in 1988 when Immortal Love, a backlog of stories and monologues from the last twenty years, saw the light of day. Acclaim followed when her novel The Time: Night (1992) made the shortlist for the Russian Booker Prize.