Acclaim for Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
“Petrushevskaya writes instant classics.”
—The Daily Beast
“Her suspenseful writing calls to mind the creepiness of Poe and the psychological acuity (and sly irony) of Chekhov.”
—More
“What distinguishes the author is her compression of language, her use of detail, and her powerful visual sense.”
—Time Out New York
“The fact that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is Russia’s premier writer of fiction today proves that the literary tradition that produced Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Babel is alive and well.”
—Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast
“A master of the Russian short story.”
—Olga Grushin, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov
“There is no other writer who can blend the absurd and the real in such a scary, amazing, and wonderful way.”
—Lara Vapnyar, author of There Are Jews in My House
“One of the greatest writers in Russia today and a vital force in contemporary world literature.”
—Ken Kalfus, author of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
“A master of the short story form, a kindred spirit to writers like Angela Carter and Yumiko Kurahashi.”
—Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen
PENGUIN BOOKS
There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In
LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen volumes of prose, including the New York Times bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPR’s Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction, and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia’s most prestigious prize, the Triumph, for lifetime achievement.
ANNA SUMMERS is the coeditor and cotranslator of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales and the editor and translator of Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. Born and raised in Moscow, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is the literary editor of The Baffler.
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First published in Penguin Books 2014
Copyright © 1988, 1992, 2002 by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Translation and introduction copyright © 2014 by Anna Summers
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
In the original Russian “Among Friends” and “The Time Is Night” were published in issues of Novy Mir and “Chocolates with Liqueur” in the collection The Goddess Parka (Vagrius, Moscow). Anna Summers’ translation of “Among Friends” appeared in The Baffler.
Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Petrushevskaia, Liudmila
[Novellas. Selections. English. 2014]
There once lived a mother who loved her children, until they moved back in : three novellas about family / Ludmilla Petrushevskaya ; translated by Anna Summers ; introduction by Anna Summers.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-698-14182-7
1. Petrushevskaia, Liudmila—Translations into English. 2. Domestic fiction, Russian—Translations into English. I. Summers, Anna, translator. II. Petrushevskaia, Liudmila. Vremia noch’. English. III. Petrushevskaia, Liudmila. Konfety s likerom. English. IV. Petrushevskaia, Liudmila. Svoi krug. English. V. Title. VI. Title: Time is night. VII. Title: Chocolates with liqueur. VIII. Title: Among friends.
PG3485.E724A2 2014
891.73’44—dc23 2014012797
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Art direction: Roseanne Serra
Cover illustration: Sam Wolfe Connelly
Version_1
This translation is dedicated to my loving husband, John, and to the memories of my mother, Irina Viktorovna Malakhova, and grandmother Klavdiya Kirillovna Malakhova.
Contents
ACCLAIM FOR LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
The Time Is Night
Chocolates with Liqueur
1 | The Housing Question
2 | Rivals
3 | Family Life
4 | Renovation
5 | Dessert
Among Friends
Introduction
Russian is a story-swapping culture. Bring your children to a playground, sit yourself down on a bench next to other sunflower-seed-crunching moms, and in ten minutes you’ll know whose husband drinks, whose younger sister got pregnant by an unknown party, and who was insulted, again, by her mother-in-law, because they all live together, and so on. But some stories a stranger won’t hear. Shameful stories—shameful by Russian standards; stories that mix violence, insanity, and jail. What they call extremal in Russian—stories too extreme for casual tale-swapping, suitable only for furtive whispering.
For example, a family of five, say, is living in a three-room apartment in Moscow in the mideighties. They have just enough. Mother and father work, the roof doesn’t leak, there are staples in the cupboards, an occasional delicacy in the fridge. There are even two crystal vases on the shelves. One day, while the grandmother and the children are out at a New Year’s pageant, the mother tries to kill the father with an ax. That’s it. The father disappears to the ER; the mother disappears to a hospital for the insane, to await trial; the crystal vases get sold to pay for the mother’s defense; six months later the mother comes home to a wasteland. With her remaining strength she tries to raise the children, while the grandmother grows more and more demented; finally the mother gets cancer. The end.
This would make a typical Ludmilla Petrushevskaya story. But it also happened in my house, to my family, many years ago. We didn’t know at the time there were stories written for us, about us; in the Soviet Union, as the narrator in Among Friends notes wryly, everyone lived as though on a desert island, and especially families like mine, families traumatize
d—and stigmatized—by extremal. Petrushevskaya’s work was suppressed for decades; only later, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, did we find out that all those years when we knew only shame and neglect, in the same city a woman exactly my mother’s age, also a mother, was composing story after story and play after play about families like ours—ordinary families who had suffered a tragedy.
• • •
The three novellas in this volume tell extreme stories that couldn’t be heard for many years—censorship wouldn’t allow it. Petrushevskaya was unable to publish Among Friends for seventeen years; it existed as samizdat. The Time Is Night was published in Germany in translation before it came out in Russia. When Among Friends and The Time Is Night finally appeared, they weren’t alone: a whole wave of previously suppressed works was released at the same time. It turned out that a number of brilliant writers had been trying to tell their own extreme tales about life in the Soviet Union, which was so opaque, so completely shrouded from both the West and its own citizens, that it was impossible to tell what was happening next door, let alone in Siberia. Fedor Abramov wrote about the devastation in the Russian countryside, the sufferings of the millions of peasants; Chinghiz Aitmatov about the government corruption and environmental disasters in Central Asia; Sergei Dovlatov about the horrors of army life; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov about arrests, interrogations, political prisons, and camps; Andrey Platonov about the civil war and the Bolshevik revolution.
And Petrushevskaya? She described in minute detail how ordinary people, Muscovites, lived from day to day in their identical cramped apartments: how they loved, how they dreamed, how they raised their children, how they took care of their elders, and how they died. She spoke for all those who suffered domestic hell in silence, the way Solzhenitsyn spoke for the countless nameless political prisoners. To write about, say, the woman next door who worked for the post office, some bedraggled Aunt Masha who was left by her husband to raise three children on a salary of ninety rubles when a pair of shoes cost twenty, if you could find them, and who had to care for her paralyzed mother while her teenage son wreaked havoc (all details from Petrushevskaya’s stories), took as much art and as much courage as describing one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. The difference was that Petrushevskaya’s subjects were closer to home—they weren’t exiled out of our sight, out of our mind. They lived across the hall; they shared the room with us; they were my mother and grandmother.
As both her critics and admirers agree, reading Petrushevskaya is an unforgettable experience. This testifies to the exceptional power of her art, because her characters, by their own admission, don’t make particularly fascinating subjects. In this volume, her heroines are tired, scared, impoverished women who have been devastated by domestic tragedies and who see little beyond the question, How to raise a child? How to feed it, clothe it, educate it when there is no strength left and no resources? Such women are boring even to themselves. Anna, the heroine of The Time Is Night, complains that no one wants to know how she lives: not her former friends or colleagues, not the state, not her neighbors—she herself can barely stand it. No one wants to know, except for Petrushevskaya. She takes it upon herself to describe her drab characters in such a way that we can’t put the book down, and when we finish reading we are overwhelmed by the most profound empathy.
Nowhere does Petrushevskaya accomplish this feat of imagination more completely than in The Time Is Night (1992), with her portrait of Anna (who, like Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, doesn’t have a last name, only a patronymic), an unemployed and unpublished poet on the cusp of old age, living in a cramped two-room apartment with her little grandson. Her mother is in a hospital for the insane; her two grown-up children constantly threaten to move in with her—one of them does so, at the very end, depriving Anna of the last vestiges of privacy.
A brief prologue indicates she’s talking to us from beyond the grave, but leaves us to wonder how and when she died. Some commentators have assumed from the overwhelming pressure conveyed in Anna’s monologue that her death was a suicide. Petrushevskaya denies this interpretation. In a sense, though, the manner of death hardly matters. Whether she died the next day or stumbled around for several more years fulfilling her duties, the part of herself that mattered most to her fades away after the last sentence, where she bids good-bye to “all the living” who have left her. The Time Is Night is, indeed, the story of two Annas. One is a tall woman with an exhausted face, poorly dressed, with neglected teeth, whose hands smell of cooking oil, and who can’t walk past you without making an uninvited comment. She torments her poor daughter but allows her worthless son to manipulate her and rob her. She commits tactless blunders and downright cruelties. This is Anna the hag. But there is another Anna, the one who is telling us all these unattractive facts about herself with such objectivity and humor, and whose sad but rich inner life envelops us the moment we start reading her posthumous diary. This is Anna the poet. It is this Anna that dies at the end of the diary, leaving the hag behind to stumble around a bit longer.
Duality is also contained in the heroine’s name, and her occupation. Petrushevskaya named her after the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who had suffered similar tragedies, yet endured for a very long time. The other poet mentioned is Marina Tsvetaeva, who did in fact kill herself. Petrushevskaya saw her Anna vacillating between Akhmatova’s stoic endurance and Tsvetaeva’s ultimate self-destruction. Anna’s life is objectively extremely hard—life during Stagnation (1964–82) was hard for everyone who wasn’t the ruling elite, and the divorced, unemployed Anna belongs to the most vulnerable and marginalized part of the population. Her tragedies are marked by extremal: her son has been to jail for a violent crime; her mother is dying from schizophrenia; her daughter is homeless. Still, the reader can’t fail to notice that some of her problems are self-induced and that despite everything there are many joys available to her. There is her adored grandson; there is her daughter who could be her friend; there are her books, her walks; and, finally, there is her poetry. The famous line by Akhmatova, “If only people knew from what muck poetry grows,” comes to mind throughout the novella. Anna has a gift, as did Akhmatova, as did Tsvetaeva, as do all talented poets, to translate the filth and muck of reality into harmonious verse. This gift, we are convinced, might have saved her had it been nourished.
• • •
The other monologue in this collection, Among Friends (1988), is Petrushevskaya’s best-known and most controversial work. The story it tells is so extreme—by peculiar Russian standards—that it wouldn’t be shared even in a whisper. Many critics and readers interpret it as an attack on Russia’s two revered institutions: friendship and motherhood. To this day Petrushevskaya gets criticized at public appearances for her heroine’s behavior.
The novella’s heroine, who narrates the story, believes herself to be dying. She lives with an estranged husband, who finally files for divorce, and a young son. Her parents are dead; all she has by way of family is a group of old friends who have known one another since college. It is their custom to convene every Friday in a little apartment that belongs to a married couple, the nucleus of their club. Throughout Russia’s imperial and Soviet history, such unofficial networks were a beloved recourse among intelligentsia, allowing them to speak their minds freely—something they couldn’t do anywhere else in a censored society. Petrushevskaya’s “friends,” however, are deeply apolitical and don’t seem to take notice of anything outside their club, including the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Behind their cynicism and snobbishness they think themselves invulnerable, yet when a patrolman pays them a visit they are too terrified to even use the bathroom. In the end, all illusions and pretenses come undone, and cozy gatherings turn into a snake pit. In the notorious closing scene that still sends readers into a fury, the desperate narrator performs an act of violence toward her son, because she believes it to be the only way to ensure that her so-called friends don’t abandon
him after her death.
• • •
The more recent Chocolates with Liqueur (2002) was conceived as a homage to Petrushevskaya’s favorite author, Edgar Allan Poe. This is the first time it appears in English. Its subject is violence against a woman and her children that’s committed daily, inside an ordinary home, in view of the numerous neighbors. One of Petrushevskaya’s scariest stories, Chocolates is narrated in a light, conversational manner, which makes the novella all the more frightening.
The heroine is Lelia, a young mother of two who is trying to protect herself and her children from a murderous, psychotic husband. Unfortunately the husband owns the apartment they live in, so Lelia has nowhere to go. The abuse carries on for years, unobserved by anyone. Only the neighbor’s pet, a German shepherd, senses Lelia’s fear, and in the end it is the dog that saves Lelia and her children. Why Lelia agreed to marry her husband in the first place is part of the novella’s mystery. She could have been pregnant by another (we are given to understand), or else she, an orphan without family or friends, could have been flattered by the young man’s persistent attention. The chief instrument of his seduction is chocolate filled with sweet liqueur—impoverished Lelia’s favorite treat. The chocolate is an allusion to the Poe story “The Cask of Amontillado,” on which this novella is based. In it the perpetrator similarly lures his victim into a mortal trap using the victim’s love of sweet wine; in both stories the crime is committed inside a respectable residential building. Out of fear for her children’s lives, Lelia is unable even to call for help during the final attack and is prepared to suffer death in silence, another mute victim of domestic tragedy.
• • •
What makes reading Petrushevskaya so disturbing yet so compelling, so depressing yet so exalting? Partly it is her exceptional eye for (often painful) detail. Partly it is the mordantly witty asides of her narrators, both sympathetic and unsympathetic. Perhaps most of all it is what we might call the courage of genius, the willingness to attempt to turn even the extremities of suffering and degradation into lucid, compassionate art. Family and friendship are inescapable and natural, and yet they are also, under these circumstances, hellish and ugly. Those who endure this extreme misery are usually mute. Petrushevskaya endured it, too, but by a kind of miracle was somehow endowed with a power of perception or sympathy, which didn’t exempt her from the misery but at least allowed her to record it. All that immense quantity of suffering and squalor would be lost, would disappear into a historical void, if it hadn’t found a laureate in her. Suffering is bad enough, but permanent invisibility is even worse. It mitigates the horror, in some mysterious way, when it is witnessed, recorded, transfigured.
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