At right, in the countryside with friends, ca. 1960. All photos courtesy of Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938. Until she was three, she lived at the Hotel Metropol in the heart of Moscow, which, at that time, housed old-guard Bolsheviks and their families⁠—her great-grandfather Ilya Veger had joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party at its founding in 1898, and her grandmother joined in 1912. Many of her relatives were executed or exiled during the Great Purge; the rest became known as enemies of the people. In 1941, the family was forced to evacuate Moscow ahead of the Nazi advance. As Petrushevskaya recounts in her memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel (2006, translation 2017), she spent the war living with her grandmother and her aunt, begging for money and food, haunting the streets. She couldn’t attend school because she had no shoes. 

In Russia, Petrushevskaya is one of the few living authors considered on par with the great Russian novelists. She is one of the most celebrated dramatists of the twentieth century; her play Moskovskii khor (Moscow choir, first production 1988) won the 2002 State Prize of the Russian Federation. Her nonsense verse is ubiquitous in elementary school textbooks, and Peter the Piglet, the hero of one of her children’s series, is a long-running meme. She has published three novels and more than a dozen collections of short stories; in English, she’s best known for the short stories, especially the “scary fairy tales” compiled and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (2009). Until the liberalizing reforms of the eighties known as perestroika, she was routinely rejected by Soviet publishers, her work circulating primarily through underground publishing networks, in samizdat. 

Although Petrushevskaya bridles at being called a feminist, her fiction, first collected in the volume Immortal Love (1988, 1995),  portrays a world in which men are rarely faithful and women are never free. Even Novy mir (The new world), the magazine that published Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel set in the gulag, once described her stories as “painfully bleak.” An alcoholic leaves his wife, kidnaps their son, and attempts to have her committed when she comes looking for them (“Clarissa’s Story”). A dying woman beats her son in front of her estranged husband and his friends, convinced that it’s the only way they’ll be moved to take care of him when she’s gone (“Our Circle”). In her debut novel and masterpiece, The Time: Night, published in Russia in 1992 (translation 1994), a destitute poet living in a two-room apartment must choose between housing her ex-convict son, a daughter who hates her, her beloved grandson, and her ailing mother. 

Before perestroika, Petrushevskaya balanced her own work with odd jobs, including writing scripts for cartoons and translating from Polish, and with caring for her mother and children. After a brief marriage to a theater actor (“An alcoholic, unfortunately,” she told me) when she was a journalism student, she married Evgeny “Zhenya” Kharatyan, a physicist, with whom she had her first son, Kirill. Zhenya died in 1971. In 1976, Petrushevskaya married the film historian Boris Pavlov, with whom she had two more children, Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich and Natalia Pavlova. Kirill, known in the family as Kiryusha, is a journalist and a founding editor of the once-independent newspaper Kommersant; Fyodor (“Fedya”) is a performance artist, and Natalia (who goes by Natasha Smitana) is an R&B singer. During our conversations, she called them whenever she needed her memory jogged, and each picked up instantly. 

In 2006, at the age of sixty-nine, Petrushevskaya turned to performing cabaret. She has since released two albums, and in 2024 alone gave concerts in Dubai, London, Riga, Stockholm, and the South of France, although a recent ping-pong injury has left her unable to play the guitar. On stage, Petrushevskaya wears a silky black frock, fingerless fishnet gloves, and a feathered hat. When we first met, this past summer, at a restaurant near her apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she has lived since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she was soon leading our table⁠—which included Kirill, his wife, his ex-wife, several grandchildren, and a baby great-granddaughter⁠—in a rousing rendition of “La Marseillaise.” Some confusion involving the name of this magazine had led to the impression that I was French. 

During my nine days in Vilnius, I spent my afternoons awaiting her summons, which invariably came in the early evening. I would arrive at her apartment bearing flowers from the farmers’ market or her preferred beverage, Coke Zero, and Petrushevskaya, who was usually watching the news from Ukraine, would ask why I was so late. We would talk until midnight or one, mostly in the company of her aide, Sveta. If she hadn’t yet taken her walk that day, we would stroll through Vilnius’s medieval Old Town. After I left, she would stay up, writing and drawing. At one point, I asked her about an announcement she’d made in 2023⁠—she’d renounced her vocation, she said, in protest of the war. “Yes, I don’t write anymore,” she confirmed. Then she read to me from the latest chapter of her new novel. 

INTERVIEWER

I read that you taught yourself to write in your late teens by imitating Joyce and Mann.

LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA

It’s always fascinating to learn something new about oneself. No, I don’t remember anything like that. I’ve always written. 

INTERVIEWER

Even as a child? 

PETRUSHEVSKAYA

What else was I supposed to do in all those orphanages and sanatoriums? Every night before bed I’d tell the whole ward a scary story⁠—the kind that makes people hold their breath, which is the only kind of story that people really listen to. Humor doesn’t cut it, or romance, or lyricism⁠—no, no, no. Only terror works. 

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think that is? 

PETRUSHEVSKAYA

It’s cathartic. As a rule, the scary stories I told had happy endings. I mean, how else is a child supposed to fall asleep? 

INTERVIEWER

The scary stories you wrote later usually end pretty badly. Was there something cathartic about them, too?  

PETRUSHEVSKAYA

That’s not a question I can answer. I needed them, so I wrote them. Some of them I made up for my kids⁠—if we were on the train and they started to jump on the seats, I’d say, “It’s story time!” After I told them “The Black Coat,” the one about suicide, they clung to me as we walked, that’s how scared they were. I learned from Gogol, after all. He’s my favorite writer⁠—I even look a little like him in profile. He had a big nose, too.  

INTERVIEWER

Did you grow up with his books?  

PETRUSHEVSKAYA

We had Wanda Wasilewska’s Pokój na poddaszu (A room in the attic), Mayakovsky’s collected works, because Mayakovsky once had a thing for my grandmother, and a copy of History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. That’s it. The history book was how I learned to read, when I was five. But my grandmother knew Gogol’s stories, and practically all of Russian literature, by heart, because her father, who was a socialist, had told his children that, when they ended up in a penal colony, they’d need something to entertain their fellow prisoners with. Her memory was incredible. She’d edited the Great Soviet Encyclopedia at the Kremlin with, as I recall, Lenin’s sister Maria Ulyanova. She and I shared a bed, and every night she would “read” to me from Petersburg Tales or Dead Souls⁠—she added a bit of schmaltz to that one. “The Portrait” completely shook me⁠—I ended up memorizing it too and would go around the courtyards in our neighborhood performing it, scaring everyone. I think it was my grandmother who made me a writer. 

INTERVIEWER

You must have loved her very much. 

PETRUSHEVSKAYA

I didn’t. I loved my mother. The four of us⁠—me, my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt⁠—had evacuated to Kuibyshev, on the Volga, in 1941. A couple of months later, my mother went back to Moscow to finish college and left me with the two of them. My grandmother and my aunt never forgave her. They’d talk about her in this made-up language spoken by underground revolutionaries, not realizing that I’d figured it out⁠—it wasn’t that hard to decipher. They were furious with her for not sending them money, because we didn’t have any. My grandmother would send me to our neighbors’ trash can to find leftovers to make soup with. But my mother was a college student! What kind of money did she have? 

I waited for her for four years, with every ounce of my being. When she finally came back for me, I started bawling. She’d made me porridge and started feeding me, forgetting that I don’t eat porridge, so of course I threw up. She carried me to the banya in her arms. They cut my hair⁠—I was covered in lice. When they were done with me, all I had left were very short bangs. She bought me new clothes⁠—I’d had one big shirt that I’d tied into a permanent knot between my legs and a raggedy summer dress. Now there I was⁠—little blond bangs, pretty new dress, sandals, socks. Thin as a twig.