There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby BY Ludmilla Petrushevskaya TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY Keith Gessen AND Anna Summers (Penguin Books, 2011) From the Publisher: “Vanishings and aparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia — or anywhere else in the world — today.”

Towards the end of Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, there is a prison scene in which a character called Trudel wakes up and admits to herself that her husband, Karli, is dead. It is an assumption that is as good as a premonition, based on her knowledge of Nazi terror, for no critic of the regime can expect to come away unscathed, and reprieves and acquittals simply don’t happen. This imagined horror leads her to contemplate another, real one, that of her miscarried child. In her mind’s eye she can visualise her husband’s shrunken face, and then the face of the unborn child. The faces merge, the horror intensifies, “and she knows that she has lost everything there is to lose in this world,” and “never will she love again, never will she conceive again.” There is a hierarchy to her loss: loving and conceiving are gone, and further down the list, “there will never be sunshine and happiness and summer for her again, or flowers…” The chaplain assures her that Karli’s sufferings are over and that he will pray for him at his grave, only to have Trudel round on him: “What good will your prayers do him? You should have prayed for his life, while there was still time!” What matters is that suffering is the hard, indigestible reality of life and must therefore be depicted in all its unpalatable rawness. Night is infinitely more credible than a false dawn. This is a passage of unremitting bleakness and one which negates the brief flurry of positivity encountered several pages earlier where, in a different cell, our hero, Otto Quangel, is told by his fellow inmate that his death will not be in vain, “and since we are fighting for justice against brutality, we are bound to prevail in the end.” Even in a prison in the darkest days of the Third Reich Fallada offers us snatches of light. Dreams go unfulfilled but an evanescent vision is better than nothing. Prayers may go unanswered or come too late, but at least they are offered. Penguin has recently released another work in translation, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby, a selection of short stories by the Russian writer, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. Reading her tales, however, one would be forgiven for thinking that Petrushevskaya’s view of the world is so despairing that there is little opportunity to enjoy anything. The characters, predominantly women, are lonely and embattled, down to their last. Divorced, widowed or simply abandoned, they pick their way through hardship and calamity, clinging to the debris of failed love affairs and thwarted ambitions. Their daily quest to stay afloat is impeded by misfortune amplified out of proportion: they are saddled with sick or unappreciative offspring; hamstrung by hunger and cold and reneged promises from the State; bowed by private millstones of past guilt and dashed hopes. She eschews Fallada’s subtle calibrations of optimism, preferring a permanence of pain. Suffering being good for the soul is by the bye, she tells us in each tale. What matters is that suffering is the hard, indigestible reality of life and must therefore be depicted in all its unpalatable rawness. Night is infinitely more credible than a false dawn. For her, Fallada’s snatches of light are facile, soft-focus shots, gaudily artificial flares. For us, his light at the end of the tunnel signals the allure, albeit spurious, of a way out; hers, on the other hand, is that of an oncoming train.

The best story in this collection also happens to be the most representative. “There’s Someone in the House” introduces us to a woman who lives alone with her cat because “everyone has departed.” She decides she is not entirely alone, that there is a poltergeist in her home. This “Creature” has to be defeated. She sets about exorcising it by destroying her apartment. She smashes furniture and plates; she stuffs all her clothes into a potato sack and throws it out the window; she takes a hammer to her beloved TV which she always watched “intently, her face pressed to the screen.” This method of destruction she compares to a military tactic, of meeting your enemy in the middle: “Like when they light a fire to battle another fire in the forest — if they intersect in the right spot, they’ll both go out for lack of oxygen.” It is not an act of vandalism but a means of survival. But the next morning she has a change of heart and abandons her “battle plan,” deciding she will not be terrorised by this spirit in her own home. She surveys her ruined apartment which looks as if it has been ravaged by “a veritable war,” and then tidies up. She has few belongings — no clothes, no functioning television – but really “her apartment has everything.” She tells us that “a person can make do without all sorts of things, so long as she’s still alive,” and Petrushevskaya reinforces her character’s new-found resilience and altered outlook by concluding with the pledge “She’s decided to live.”

The cold, clinical language complements this, with description lean and metaphor virtually nonexistent — such bare-bones prose being perhaps the most apt means to delineate lives bereft of love and tainted by abandonment.

Various components are in place to render this tale pure Petrushevskaya. People and places are nameless, faceless and for the most part featureless. This lends them a universal, everyman-everywhere quality, but also an anonymity which invariably unsettles. Our woman is only later given an identity, almost as an afterthought, becoming “the m-d (mother-daughter),” because she destroys her house in the same way her mother once destroyed the family china. Such characters are often hemmed in, made to operate in tight, cramped spaces — shared Soviet housing, stinking hospitals, dingy underground stations — and we watch them at work like exhibits in a vivarium. Either they can’t venture out or they are too afraid to. “The huge wide-open spaces of the great outdoors” is simply too overwhelming for her tiny, timid, agoraphobic people. Their fears are so irrational that they are consumed by them and would prefer quarantine or self-banishment among the rubble of scant personal effects than the unknown hazards that await them outside. To the extent that an apocalyptic mist pervades each story, a desolation as pungent and unquenchable as death. Our woman’s destroyed flat becomes “a sacred funeral ground,” “the memorial to a terrible earthquake.” Human warmth is a rare commodity because social interaction, such as there is, subsists only between chary strangers. The cold, clinical language complements this, with description lean and metaphor virtually nonexistent — such bare-bones prose being perhaps the most apt means to delineate lives bereft of love and tainted by abandonment.

Lastly, then, there is the suffering. The m-d suffers from loneliness and perhaps madness. (In a sliver of back-story we learn that the m-d was nearly driven insane by her mother “cold-bloodedly” smashing the crockery. It is our job, as reader, to determine whether in adulthood this woman is still mad). The spirit’s motives are unclear to her — “Does the Creature want her total annihilation, or just to drive her into the street?” — but since eviction into the big bad world is another form of death, both fates achieve the same result. Along with her property, the woman throws her cat out to save it from “the Creature’s maw,” fully aware that “the street awaits it, and wild dogs, and hunger.” Cruelty is inflicted chiefly against women, children and animals. Perpetrators escape unpunished. The attendant themes of justice, comeuppance and rehabilitation are not Petrushevskaya’s business. Deciding to live at the very end of the story means her character must be prepared to take the rough with the smooth, and in Petrushevskaya’s world, maybe even our world, each character can expect to be dealt more of the rough.

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.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby comes with a fiendish subtitle — “Scary Fairy Tales.” The stories are divided into four sections — “Songs of the Eastern Slavs,” “Allegories,” “Requiems” and indeed “Fairy Tales” — but the borders are in fact blurred, the genres interchangeable, with no clear distinction between, say, an allegory and a requiem. (This does not matter a great deal when we remember that Animal Farm, a textbook allegory, also has the subtitle “A Fairy Story.”) This is emphasised by the fact that some of the stories in all four sections begin with the classic fairy-tale intro of “There once lived a woman…” or “There once lived a man…” Similarly misleading is the discovery that there is no such story as “There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby,” fairy tale or otherwise. The story it is based on, “Revenge,” has seemingly been rebranded with something more sensational.

Freud said that fairy tales can never be scary because they are simply too fantastic. We need a ‘conflict of judgement’ about the incredible things we read and whether they could ever be true…

If we ignore any quibbles with the contents, and accept that these stories are all scary fairy tales, we quickly find ourselves asking how they are scary and what makes them fairy tales. In the first instance, they are not scary in the slightest. Scary is Grimm-territory, such as “Stepmother,” in which the title’s wicked harridan suffocates her stepson in the cellar and then, “since it was evening,” slices him into pieces and cooks him over the fire. Like a child-friendly (or not) bite-sized version of the banquet scene in Titus Andronicus, she later serves him up to her unsuspecting husband for dinner. This is more than scary, it is downright nasty. With Petrushevskaya we are hard-pushed even to find a tale that is macabre. “The Cabbage-patch Mother” features a woman who has “a tiny droplet of a baby” that she carries around in a matchbox; “Marilena’s Secret” tells of a fat woman who was once comprised of two ballerinas, Maria and Lena, both of whom were rolled into one by a vengeful and lovelorn magician; and “The Black Coat” deals with a girl who does not remember who she is and has to make sense of the new reality imposed on her in an empty building full of vanishing rooms and self-erasing letters. Interesting ideas, but there is nothing scary here. Freud said that fairy tales can never be scary because they are simply too fantastic. We need a “conflict of judgement” about the incredible things we read and whether they could ever be true — “and this problem is eliminated from the outset by the postulates of the world of fairy tales.” Perhaps bizarre is a more suitable description.

In the second instance, Petrushevskaya has said she does write skazki, fairy tales, and having studied their form, knows that “fairy tales have to end happily.” Very few of her tales do. (Whilst “There’s Someone in the House” contains quintessential Petrushevskaya characteristics, its rosy ending is thoroughly atypical.) The most successful fairy tales are those that are possessed by the blackest of magic, but Petrushevskaya goes further, deeper, sharpening the relief so as to extract maximum darkness, and shelving all notions of good trumping evil — indeed dispensing with the two completely and instead letting the often stunned and guileless characters loose in hallucinatory realms devoid of laws and logic. They are less an updating of Grimm and Anderson and more a spin on Angela Carter and Kafka. How we react to the aforementioned broken-down summaries is akin to our response to the news that Gregor Samsa has woken one morning from uneasy dreams and transformed into a gigantic insect. Knee-jerk surprise can lead to amusement but it can just as frequently sour rapidly into disdain. This is due to the very divisive nature of fairy tales, or more correctly, fairy tales for adults. Fantasy for adults is a maligned genre but one that is still tolerated; fairy tales for adults demands a more impassioned defence, and stands a better chance of being taken seriously (and of being sold) when aided and abetted by marketing misnomers.

Petrushevskaya assures us that hers are “real fairy tales.” Perhaps by this she means her stories are all based on genuine experiences. “Many people have told me the stories of their lives… Not a single thing in my stories and plays in invented,” she explained to Baird. This information is remarkable when we apply it to the stories in this collection. In the first one, “The Arm,” a man exhumes his wife’s body because she has told him in a dream that it is in her coffin that he will find his missing Party card. However, she warns him that under no circumstances is he to lift the veil from her face. The man disinters the coffin and retrieves his card but can’t resist a peek at his wife’s face. Later he goes back to war, only to discover his unit has been besieged, with everyone dead or wounded. He sits down at a campfire and notices a woman with a scarf round her head. She turns to him and he realises it is his wife. She berates him for lifting his veil and informs him that as a result his arm is going to wither. At the end of the tale he wakes up in hospital, and is told he had been found by his wife’s grave, but lying on his arm in such a way that it may now have to be amputated.

Along with a blurring of sections, then, is a blurring of dream and reality. Petrushevskaya will not proffer hope as generously as Fallada and the glimpses that are on show come in unconscious visions, rendering the hope even hazier and all the more ungraspable.

Later, in “The Fountain House,” we learn that “There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life.” The girl’s father can’t accept her death and uses all the money in the house to pay a doctor to act out the charade of working on the girl with a view to reviving her. The doctor needs the money for an apartment and so plays along. We encounter another dream sequence, this time with the daughter at the summer camp she used to attend. The father offers her a sandwich but notices that between the slices of black bread is a raw human heart. She is hungry and wants to eat it, but he saves her — “if his daughter ate this sandwich, she would die.” He eats the heart instead and is glad, for it means he will die first.

Along with a blurring of sections, then, is a blurring of dream and reality. Petrushevskaya will not proffer hope as generously as Fallada and the glimpses that are on show come in unconscious visions, rendering the hope even hazier and all the more ungraspable. Suffering is thus briefly assuaged, only to be cranked up in the cold light of day when stark reality draughts back in. (Is Gregor Samsa better off in his new, metamorphosed state than earlier, during his “uneasy dreams”?) “‘I want to wake up,’ says the girl in “The Black Coat,” ‘I want to end this horrible nightmare.’” Unfortunately Petrushevskaya’s binary realities are scarcely distinguishable, a frying-pan and a fire being the sole options, with no adjacent greener grass, no lesser evil.

This symbiosis of dreamy somnambulism and wide-awake cognisance has mixed results. “The Fountain House” is wrapped up with a conclusion-cum-caveat: “It was in a dream, though, that it happened, and dreams don’t count.” Petrushevskaya wants the best of both worlds here — the events are ludicrous, but it is fine because they happen to take place in an alternative reality, the dream sequence. But while this line strives to be cunningly knowing, it is in effect jauntily throwaway. In “Incident at Sokolniki” a woman buries what she believes to be a pilot’s abandoned flight-suit, only to be shocked by the fleshed-out reality: “And in her dream her husband came to her and said, ‘Thank you, Lida, for burying me’.” This last line is also intended to shock us but the reverse is true. Petrushevskaya is even thriftier with her prose: characters are mere outlines, situations over with at the end of a sentence. It is brief to the point of being insubstantial, and so we are unable to get any traction on it. As a result it does not generate eeriness, and we are lucky if we are surprised, let alone shocked. But it is the ending which is the real problem: the reader sees what is coming a mile off. Several other stories are marred by the same flaws.

These twin faults don’t have to be damaging in a short story. Brevity is no sin, for the best short stories are mere vignettes anyway, containing and pulsing with snatches of life. And as long as the story isn’t a whodunit, the predicted conclusion is tolerated if the writing can stand up — the travelling being more enjoyable than the arriving. But a good portion of these tales are too episodic to have a sustaining impact. We feel it in particular in a story called “The Miracle.” As in her novel, The Time: Night, we have a woman who is tormented by her abusive and ungrateful son. At her wit’s end, she is told to find Uncle Kornil who can give her advice. It turns out he lives in the boiler room of a hospital. She is instructed to take as an offering a bottle of vodka. She discovers quickly he doesn’t live alone there, it being

No impressions, no smells, no real sights — there is hardly any distinction between this scene and the one Nadya has just left aboveground. What should be a descent into a scabrous and toxic netherworld is nothing more than an unsavoury trip downstairs. Petrushevskaya opts for plain description and forges an atmosphere shorn of menace. The similes are either misjudged (“Nadya made for the door like a tank”) or stale (“He looked like he’d just been picked out of the trash”). (Later, and paradoxically, in a bid to give more life to Kornil, we are told “Kornil lay there like a corpse”). The author’s approach serves a purpose when describing feeling but not a mood or a scene. It reminds us that these are skeletal fairy-tales when placed alongside Carter’s colourful, gutsy abundance; too brittle when weighed against Kafka’s robustness. In a similar vein “The Black Coat” is underwritten. We find ourselves reading Petrushevskaya and longing to shade in the missing detail. The dark building in which the amnesiac girl loses herself further should be more, namely a threatening funhouse where each room is a hall-of-mirrors which distorts images, discomfits characters and disorientates both character and reader. By the same token we yearn to refashion her endings. When the girl’s mother says “Dear God, what a terrible dream I’ve just had,” the wearyingly familiar ground annuls the other shock Petrushevskaya has for us.

Her tales are Kafka-like rather than Kafkaesque, as the latter carries with it an in-built set of tropes and themes. But unlike Kafka, Petrushevskaya tells rather than foretells, choosing to illustrate the quotidian misery of Soviet and post-Soviet life, not what future miseries might be in store. There is grievance and criticism to be found in these stories but no one-man armies railing or flailing ineffectually against tortuous laws, warped justice and amorphous authority. The most Kafka-like stories in this collection deal with the topos of persecution: “The New Robinson Crusoes,” in which a family are on the run in the “forgotten country” to escape an unnamed foe, and “Hygiene,” which has a family barricading themselves indoors to protect against a life-threatening epidemic. Both families are therefore retreating, with outside and inside flip-sides of the same coin. Tellingly, the family in “Hygiene” is the R. family, redolent of The Trial’s Josef K., and later Coetzee’s Michael K — broken, stubby, abbreviated names (like the m-d) for withered, worn-down characters, and their close confinement in their prison-cell home brings to mind the Strafkolonie and Michael K’s holding camps. Once again they are characters we are not fully allowed to get acquainted with. Petrushevskaya holds too much back, sometimes only doling out shadows: In “There’s Someone in the House” the m-d encounters scavengers in the gloom who behave “like shades of men — shy, unnoticeable, dark.” And in ‘The Shadow Life’ we hear that “her mother had been young still and might have fallen into that shadow life, from which so many people never return.” Not only single characters but whole families in her stories drift across the page and perform deeds but who are ultimately unknowable. Families are usually fragmented wholes in Petrushevskaya’s world anyway, with members dispersed, marriages shattered and homes broken. “All those family dramas straight out of Turgenev,” our m-d says when recalling what it was like to have a family, but the cruelty among family members, ranging from bickering to hatred, with scars left festering and feuds unresolved, lies in stark contrast to Turgenev’s essentially redemptive tales, even when they do come at the cost of unfulfilled love.

There is a tapering at work in Petrushevskaya’s fiction, a diminution in action and character, which explains the often anti-climactic conclusions of each tale. Back-story is virtually nonexistent, but when it does appear it is to help accentuate a character’s loss, what he or she once has and presently lacks. That’s your lot, we seem to be told each time when yearning for more specific topography or a dab of local colour. Her characters accept their fates, yield to their ever-imminent attenuation, and many see life as merely a prelude to death. Her characters accept their fates, yield to their ever- imminent attenuation, and many see life as merely a prelude to death. Indeed, mortality is not only inevitable, it seems to be just around the corner. When the m-d’s mother “in a fit” smashes the family china she screams at her daughter “I’m going to die, all right, but you’ll be left with nothing.” Even the china has a connection to death — they only keep it “in case they’d have to sell it to pay for a funeral.” The Creature pollutes not only the m-d’s living quarters but her entire vicinity: “Death itself is on that stairwell, dressed up in a thin fur coat.” The few characters who are fighters seem to be emboldened by secret sources of resilience, like the R. family and the anonymous girl in “The Black Coat,” but the majority see themselves as foredoomed. In “There’s Someone in the House” even “the cat is preparing to die.” Some characters wish death on others. In “My Love” a man is so fixated by a photo of a woman that “having buried his mother-in-law, he began waiting patiently for his wife to die as well.” Others wish it on themselves, such as the monk in “The Old Monk’s Testament” who walks off to a certain, almost preordained death, and his murderers who later hand themselves in and insist “they be put to death.” Petrushevskaya intensifies the suffering by dwelling on long-drawn-out death throes — to the extent that many of her creations aren’t quite wraiths because they are spending so much time continuing to die. The ending of the m-d’s tale is unique because it is upbeat, but its real uniqueness lies in the specificity of that upbeatness, namely the fact that “she’s decided to live.” Everyone else has decided to die.

In 1991 the critic Mikhail Zolotonosov wrote an article in which he identified ten different literary “subcultures” of contemporary Russian literature. In Literature, History and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia, 1991-2006 (2007), Rosalind Marsh throws light on each of these groups and explains the definition of “underground writer” as “a term used by the critic [Zolotonosov] to denote texts written in the Brezhnev period… which do not achieve publication until after perestroika.” All of the writers contained in each subculture were classed as dissidents. One group comprised famous personages such as Bulgakov and Pasternak, whose “apocalyptic ideas and imagery” were at loggerheads with the party’s decreed policy of Socialist Realism. Doctor Zhivago was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988, having previously only been available in samizdat form, and Babel, another revived writer “brought out of storage and prisons,” was posthumously pardoned with the publication of his Civil War Diary in 1990. Paired with Petrushevskaya is Yevgeny Popov, a writer who shares her rancorous tone and who is also concerned with the bleak, daily struggle for survival, and with characters who squabble, back-stab and drink themselves to death. However, he is arguably a more clownish writer than Petrushevskaya, whose black comedy in her stories is of a different ilk to the often ribald comedy of her plays. But more importantly, Popov can be read as an activist writer, a more scathing critic of the regime that once bound him. These underground writers were banned for not towing the line, for their flagrant iconoclasm that spoke of dissatisfaction and hinted at revolt. Many of the writers in the nineties were true successors to the heroes of the past, furthering Bulgakov’s stealthy anti-state rhetoric and Solzhenitsyn’s more brazen censuring. Petrushevskaya’s stance was always more quietist, her crime being to continually paint in the grimmest of greys and to favour showcasing the sad and lonely plight of the individual over that of a general, happy, homogeneous society. Equally condemned was her arbitrariness, her decision to stay authorially aloof and punish the good whilst letting the bad off scot free. But this is how my life was, we hear her telling us, and so this is how life is.

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.

In the end, whether these are fairy tales or allegories is not worth debating: they evade classification in the same way they resist a final analysis. Perhaps it is safe to say that here is a writer who has carved out her own niche, but staying true to it can mean being circumscribed by it. It is hard to strike a perfect balance when spinning the adult fairy tale. Too many writers overcompensate with a surfeit of phantasmagoria, blinding instead of dazzling us. Petrushevskaya goes her own way, but the effect is writing that is articulate yet unarresting. Fairy tales need glut, not subtlety, and we read her and keep waiting for more. If only her “Orchards of Unusual Possibilities” could be possessed with the foreboding of Hansel and Gretel’s wood. Rudolf Ditzen took Hans Fallada as his nom de plume from “The Goose Girl,” a Grimm tale that is bulging with excess and we gorge ourselves on it. We also relish the cruelty, the wicked chambermaid who at the end “deserves nothing better… than to be stripped completely naked and put inside a barrel studded with sharp nails. Then two white horses should be harnessed to the barrel and made to drag her through the streets until she’s dead.” The talking horse (Falada) is decapitated by a knacker. In a more modern incarnation, though set in prelapsarian times, Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains begins with a ban: Marianne is not to leave her white tower that has survived “the blast” and venture beyond the outer wire fence. This has echoes of Petrushevskaya’s “Hygiene” — the incarceration, the hostility lurking outside, the fug of fall-out — but Carter is superior at threat, for Marianne’s nurse warns “If you are not a good little girl, the Barbarians will eat you… They wrap little girls in clay just like they do with hedgehogs, wrap them in clay, bake them in the fire and gobble them up with salt.” The threat in “Hygiene”? Go outside and you’ll die.

That other fairy-tale practitioner, Orwell, once wrote that “the best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews… to the few that seem to matter.” Petrushevskaya does matter and shouldn’t be ignored, and despite the unevenness of this collection, there is still much to admire. Her singular vision and unique voice are in evidence in all these tales — fashioning them and then embossing them. We should marvel at this writer’s inimitability, not to mention her perseverance, and laud her for steadfastly and stubbornly working against the grain.