Consequently she should belong in a class of her own. She was an underground writer, but one who wrote inside and against the tradition, pursuing her own agenda. “I’ve never had any desire to get involved in politics or enter public life in any way,” she told Sally Baird, duly distancing herself from her more radical peers. Six years earlier, in 1987, she talked of being “an outsider partly because I’m out of step with my own generation.” There is always the risk of generalising when attributing writers to literary groups, not to mention a great deal of brush-tarring, which damages greater writers and unfairly increases the stock of lesser ones. More peculiar, though, is the tendency to throw countrymen together under the atavistic assumption that similar roots and heritage automatically translate into similar artists. If there is any “tradition” Petrushevskaya belongs to then it has to be that of her favourite writers, and she is on record as declaring a love for Joyce, Proust, Bunin, Bulgakov and Thomas Mann. (It is interesting that there is no mention of Kafka. Omission seems to be as standard as inclusion when trying to get a handle on her work.) We can instantly single out two of them: her postmodern trickery is a Joycean revamp, and the random cruelty and forays into dark fantasy and dreamscape is a homage to Bulgakov (in “The Black Coat” the girl, like Margarita, is urged to fly — “you can fly wherever you want”).

Keith Gessen and Anna Summers have done an expert job in translating Petrushevskaya’s flinty prose and capturing her brand of melancholy and madness. In their introduction they tell us that Petrushevskaya invented a name for the subverted fictional reality in which she invites her readers: “Orchards of Unusual Possibilities.” It is a pity that similar poetry is barred entry to most of her stories. Perhaps it is too ornate, and would prettify that pessimistic Weltanschauung, rendering her vision inauthentic. Sometimes, though, it slips through:

And after skipping a paragraph:

Unfortunately here she breaks off. “But this is all prologue” she informs us peremptorily, and then whisks us on to the real start of the tale (“A New Soul”), one which involves Grisha, a lunatic, who has “a little hole below his neck, like an extra eye, from which tears poured out.” Just to be sure that it is business as usual, we learn that Grisha “saw strange dreams.”

Then there is this quite different paragraph from “Hygiene”:

The problem here has nothing to do with Petrushevskaya, or the translators, but with Penguin. They have remembered to insert the “u” in the word “neighbour” in the book’s title, to anglicise it for the British market, but for some reason have failed in every other respect to fillet the Americanisms. Change “Nikolai” for “Jon” and the above passage reads like a chunk of text from modern American fiction. This is, of course, no bad thing, but, and perversely, it is an unwritten rule that a foreign work needs to be translated into our mother tongue in order to ring true. Flaubert in Italian, to anyone who isn’t Italian, is tugged down by an undertow of Italian. Our own first language gives us a second-hand interpretation but this is better than one that is third-hand. This passage sounds foreign, but not Russian. Nikolai visiting the garbage chute with his flashlight and the jelly he has gotten is a third-hand reading, and sadly de-Russified. Highlighting this may sound petty or even churlish but at times these stories feel less like Petrushevskaya’s and more like the property of the translators.