Tag: Contemporary Russian Literature

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fall” – a modern “Lady with the Dog”

After the big braying dogs of the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s a curious turnaround that some of the most important people writing in Russian in recent years are women – Maria Stepanova, Tatyana Tolstaya, Ludmilla Ulitskaya, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. With the exception of Stepanova, who is from the generation after the other three, they came to creative maturity as the Soviet Union was collapsing, a fact without which much of their work would have been unpublishable, and are now in their seventies and eighties, living in self-imposed exiles. A blog post on Ulitskaya’s Big Green Tent may one day appear here. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, so much as that I didn’t love it. Long, meandering, it had something of Pynchon in its encyclopaedic portrayal of Soviet dissidents, but shared the American writer’s lack of warmth. Today, I am taking a different approach. Through a close analysis of a single four-page story by Ludmilla Petrushevskya, I’d like to make the case for her own brilliance.

Nothing Petrushevskaya has written has been very long. The three works collected in There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In (not Petrushevskaya’s title, nor those of the other Penguin editions of her work in English, as far as I can make out) are at the lower bound of a novella in length. Her more typical mode is the very short story. Not quite flash fiction, these are still only a few pages long. If you seek a modern Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, at least in form, you will be disappointed. Yet that is perhaps the only ground for disappointment, for these stories are innovative, especially in their narration, and far truer to my experience of the majority of Russian lives today than any ballroom or hunt from War and Peace.

Quotations from the story come from the translation by Anna Summers, found in There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. The quotes at the end come translated via The Moscow Times.

“The Fall” is a love story, told from the sidelines. “That summer we watched a transformation by the sea. We were staying across the street from a resort for workers; she was one of the guests. We couldn’t ignore her – she was too vulgar.” This beginning is shocking not through what it says, but how it says it. Immediately we have a narrative voice that wishes not one bit to settle into a kind of easy anonymity like a grand 19th century doyen – it wants to judge, and crush with that judgement. Even without the word “vulgar” there’s this persistent “we”, which begins three out of the first four sentences of the story. It seems to say that we don’t have a narrator, so much as an unquestionable judgement from the very voice of polite society.

Against this society, we have a woman, who is given by it the name of Carmen. “Just imagine her: a tight perm, plucked eyebrows, gaudy lipstick, a miniskirt”. Note the command to imagine – the narrator doesn’t just want to judge, they want to force readers into adopting their perspective – to picture the scene so that they can judge the same way. Carmen herself seems to be looking for love. Between the chops of the narrator as they try to destroy any worth that plan may have – “she strained, pathetically”, “a little womanly happiness (as imagined in soap operas)” – we understand that much about Carmen’s intentions.

Carmen has several admirers, from “a tall one in a heavy wool suit”, to “a skinny youth with hippie locks”. To the narrator, they are like animals – the word “pack” is used twice for them. By the next paragraph, “Number One”, the man in the suit, has come out on top. “Carmen and Number One walk about with dignity: she’s curbed her laughing; he carries her purse.”

“Dignity”? The narrator has shifted their tone from the total dismissal of the first page. The first sign of this comes a little earlier, when describing her laugh: “our Carmen laughs shrilly, but not as shrilly or loudly as one would expect – her laugh is not the war cry of some neighbourhood whore who invites all and sundry to her table; this Carmen laughs softly.” As a reader you can almost hear the frustration in the narrative voice – that “but not” that shows they would like to be meaner but cannot justify it, that reference to a “neighbourhood whore” so as to tar Carmen by association within the sentence, even if the narrator cannot call her such outright.

The next paragraph sees the two of them on a bus. Phrases like “those atrocious heels” let us know that Carmen is still in trouble, even if other remarks, like how “Number One gazes abstractly over everyone’s heads, looking out for his little lady”, suggest a seriousness to the couple and their “love” that the dismissive narrator, in their cruelty, lacks. “The biggest misery of all – a doomed love” – that’s the narrator’s assessment. But coming from such a meanie, whose only goal seems the tearing-down of others, this love, however doomed, shines like a light in the narration. Carmen, as a name, may refer to a fictional character, but she seems considerably more real and authentic than the woman staying in the hotel across the road.

The result of love, as it should be, is transfiguration: “Carmen has mellowed and acquired a golden sheen. Her ridiculous curls have loosened up and lightened in the sun”. The judgement “ridiculous” is replaced by the neutral statement that the curls have loosened up. The narrator changes tack, from dismissing her as crass to a kind of crushing, dismissive, fake pity that is even nastier. They are “trying to dance” as “a few days remain” before their “eternal separation.”

In the final paragraphs the time has slipped forward as “The new season has begun.” What happened cannot matter. Their love, like everything in this world, is washed away as a new wave of guests rolls in. The two of them have gone “back to their children and spouses”, and all that remains is a “long-distance call in a phone booth at the post office.” In the end, “They’ll shout and cry across thousands of miles, deceived by the promise of eternal summer, seduced and abandoned.” What a pessimistic ending! But note, though, the tense – we are now in the future. The narrator’s knowledge of other people has already been undermined by the time we get here – so why trust her suggestion of what the couple will do? There’s no need. In this shift to the future, there is a small gap for readerly agency – we can find hope where the narrator does not. But that is all we can do.

“The Fall” is Petrushevskaya at her best. It’s a story where the hard work is not in the language or images directly so much as in what lies behind it – the narrator and their voice. The narrator here is unreliable, but not in the sense of someone who conceals the truth. Instead, their prejudices distract them from it, so that they struggle to see the value of the love of poor Carmen. By seeing their petty prejudices, and following their interaction with what we take to be the reality underneath – a fairly average Black Sea romance – readers are led to see their own prejudices and how they might obscure their view of the world. At the same time, like a good character, the narrator is themself changing as they narrates – we hear their surprise at Carmen’s relationship, and there’s a certain commendable honesty in the way they belittles her without calling her something she is not, such as a whore.

It’s hard to read “The Fall” without also thinking about how it fits into the wider Russian literary tradition, because for one the comparison with Chekhov’s Lady with the Little Dog is so obvious. Both are Black Sea adultery tales, after all. Yet the texts are very different, despite their setting. Chekhov’s tale has a neutral, unobtrusive narrator. Instead, its focus is on Gurov, a serial adulterer who discovers that he is capable of true love after all. After the initial romance in Crimea, instead of just “long-distance call[s]”, Gurov actually follows Anna to her hometown to see her, and after that “the most difficult and complicated part” of their affair begins. As for Carmen, perhaps the same may happen with her too – as I noted, we don’t know. But what both works implicitly aim to do, is show the transfiguring power of love. Carmen becomes beautiful, and Gurov becomes good.

Love, though in adultery – it’s a little scandalous, even today. Neither narrator judges the relationship, only the romance. This stands in contrast to another great Russian work on adultery, Anna Karenina, which Lady with the Little Dog responds to. With the epigraph “vengeance is mine, I will repay”, Tolstoy is quite willing to be explicit about adultery’s evils when the other writers are not.  Out of the topic he wrote a huge novel, contrasting adultery to the good love of Kitty and Levin. Chekhov reacted to this by writing something much smaller. Adultery, he seems to say, is a thing to consider based on the specific case, rather than some abstract moral scheme. Gurov was leading a bad life before he met Anna, yet somehow this final adultery finally freed him from much in his life that was evil. Life is strange, but that’s why it’s wonderful. 

In “The Fall,” the narrator is like a representation of the forces of society in Tolstoy that ultimately drive Anna to her death, a figure judging and condemning. Yet just as Tolstoy himself couldn’t help but create in Anna a creature of vitality and excitement that readers have come to love, here too the narrator in “The Fall” has to admit the validity of the human as opposed to the ease of the casual condemnation. The dignity of Carmen and Number One is not just a thing they have, it is also a thing that the narrator, begrudgingly, grants them – they are in love, however doomed, and that makes them sparkle.

Like Chekhov, Petrushevskaya writes about the little folk. In that, her stories remind me much more of the Russia I knew than do those of any other writer. The dirt and grime and flaking wallpaper of a communal apartment I visited with a friend, the cramped kitchen of my ex-girlfriend’s family, with the same oily soups swapping pans day-in, day-out – such scenes Petrushevskaya brings to life. To them she adds, lit with a painful light, characters and events that I was lucky enough to mostly miss – endless stories of alcoholism, murder, and domestic violence. Chekhov is easy to read – he redeems the pathetic and largely innocent; Petrushevskaya is harder because the people she tries to redeem are often so obviously horrible even as she tries to save them.

The full extent of this badness is something she herself discovered to her horror only recently. In July 2023, she publicly announced she had given up writing, perhaps for good: “I’ve always written about my people. About the people who live in Russia. I felt sorry for them, the drunks and wretches… But now I don’t feel sorry for my people — invaders, thieves and rapists, murderers of children and destroyers of other people’s lives — or their hateful families, their wives and mothers… I will never write about them or for them.”

What are you supposed to do as a writer of a people who no longer seem worthy of redemption? If an author herself seems to turn on her work, should we still read it? If we spend our time looking through grime for chinks of light, that might make for good fiction, but isn’t it itself a bit hypocritical? Shouldn’t we instead get the damp cloth that will wipe the grime away?

I’ve been turning Petrushevskaya’s words over in my mind for months, and though I admire her stance, I think we should continue reading her stories and engaging with her characters. These stories are windows to a world – both through the flawed narrators, and through the grim narration – that exists. Without understanding it, with its prejudice and its meanness (in both senses, for after all these stories are unglamourously short compared to the great works of the 19th century), there is no way that the cycles of violence and trauma that characterise Russian life so strikingly can ever be stopped. Here in Petrushevskaya, there’s no wish fulfilment here for me to enjoy, but there is an overwhelming sense of seriousness. That, with fiction, is important too.

If you want to get started with Petrushevskaya, among the English language collections available, I’d say the collection this story comes from is the best – There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories. There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In is good too, but a little less approachable. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby I did not enjoy as much, but perhaps I’ll revisit it later.

Maria Stepanova – In Memory of Memory

I don’t know, both because I wasn’t born then and because I still haven’t read enough, whether at any other time there has been such an obsession with memory as there is in our own age. Still, I suspect not. There have been times in the past when humanity has loved some deeper past – commonly that of the Romans, the ancient Greeks, or Renaissance Italy – but that love was always for the big things, not the small, personal, or individual. We loved soaring city gates, the idea of military triumph, or some kind of atmosphere we believed to predominate among the homes of the great and the good. We only cared about the individual insofar as we could imagine how we ourselves would make use of this environment to grow our own strength, or more sinisterly, the strength of our own state. In that sense, this past-obsession has always been egotistical, uncaring. Nobody looks back to a time of shared bread, only the great wars or cultures bread fuelled.

We are more sceptical of such ideas now, the idea of building a state or even a self according to past models. I smile wryly at those men who try to construct and conduct themselves as if they were a Roman tribune. And as for states, the evidence seems pretty conclusive – the best way to build a future is to work in the present, not reshape things according to some untransferable past or imaginary utopian scheme.

Today, though, the past retains its power – what has changed is the focus. Individual memory has now come to take the place of the wider past in prominence. Maybe it has some connection with Francis Fukuyama’s much maligned idea of the end of history – that now that the present is sorted, we only need to do a little tinkering upon the past, and all will be perfected.  “Memory brings the past and present into confrontation in the search for justice.” This is how Maria Stepanova, the contemporary Russian-Jewish writer of poetry and prose, puts it in In Memory of Memory, translated into English by the poet Sasha Dugdale. We go back, but only personally, into the past, not in search of a better world, but to bring back evidence of the past’s unjustness, that we may not repeat it, or more simply not let it form false images in our mind.

(Maybe we go back for another reason. The world of the present is now, even if we discount the wars surrounding us and mounting tensions of all sorts, strangely soft and hard to find a foothold in. To go back into memory is to find something solid, to make something solid if we do it with our own past or another past we choose. It’s another manifestation of that urge to find some small sense of power in a world that seems both crying out for goodness but also near-impossible-seeming to influence as an individual.)

Instead of a description of death camps in history books, which to one politically aligned with such things can seem a jolly good idea or else a fabrication, or even the historical novel, which sadly can always and easily be denied any impact on the heart or mind by the latter charge, what is individual and evidence-based always makes a much stronger impression, at least on me. The German writer W.G. Sebald sits strangely but centrally in this world of memory, creating fiction (?) that is both evidence-based and not, bringing in sources that were both real (most of the facts) and not (some photos), something which has led to no small amount of controversy since his death.

In Memory of Memory is post-Sebaldian. You can read descriptions of it online in catalogues and on marketplaces and nobody quite knows whether its mix of genres contains fiction or not, and if so, how much. Like a work of Sebald our narrator is in the world, wandering about, talking to people, visiting old graveyards. Like Sebald, we have a range of media – diaries, letters, notes, photos. I have no ability to question whether Maria Stepanova is telling the truth, nor any particular desire to. The work feels true and I trust the narrative voice. Is it just that sense of doubt which makes something seem fictional?

Sebald often seems to present things as such clear truths that we might want to question him, especially with his love of coincidence; Stepanova is more likely to take us into her confidence when things go wrong. At the end of the first chapter of In Memory of Memory she has just visited the remote village of Pochinky, once home to part of her family, in search of clues as to their past existence. She finds none. On the way back she remembers that she should have checked the cemetery there and calls her contact. No cemetery left, she hears, but there was a Jew still living there. “She even knew his name: Gurevich. Strangely enough it was my mother’s maiden name.” This failure (and there are many others) is enough to make me trust Stepanova, to shift my attention from the teller onto the tale in a way that we never quite can with Sebald.

So, what tale? “This book about my family is not about my family at all, but about something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova can speak for herself, especially when the translation is done by a poet and is this consistently beautiful and clear throughout. On the one hand, In Memory of Memory is about Stepanova’s family. She tries to sift through documents, archives, and oral stories to create a picture of the fates of some of her relatives throughout the past hundred or so years – educated Jews for the most part, who somehow survived the worst of the 20th century. At the same time, the work stretches beyond this. It asks important ethical questions about how we treat the past and its people.

There’s a lot here. Not too much for itself, but too much for a blog post. In Memory of Memory is an incredibly rich work and one of the most brilliant I’ve read in recent years. Stepanova may tell us of a man expecting a knock on the door at any moment during the Great Terror who throws all his documents into the fire, but in spite of this and other incidents of destruction she manages to achieve a great deal – but never so much that her reconstructions seem unfairly wrought. To give an example, we have a chapter which is just descriptions of about twenty photos. The point, as I took it, was to undermine the idea that photographs are perfectly truthful or helpful documents. (Even before we talk of Stalin’s love of airbrushing). If we know no context, do not even know the people in the photos, then photos are strangely reluctant to provide any useful information.

Meanwhile, in the various “Not-a-chapters” scattered throughout the book we have other documents, typically letters, with what context Stepanova can provide for them.  In one, from 1947, we have a single letter, which makes reference to “our appalling conversation” but gives no more clues as to its meaning. There are, I think, clues elsewhere in the book, but only faint ones. Again, the purpose seems to be to emphasise that sometimes the past refuses to be receptive, to answer our requests for a complete story, a neat takeaway. Letters are missing, things are not written down, life is not neat. A diary which sets the book going has nothing personal in it at all until the odd message, the last one included in In Memory of Memory, where the writer notes “sleep is my salvation.” With Sebald, we feel the danger of forgetting; with Stepanova, we fear things have already been forgotten without possibility for return.

Only one chapter is story-like in its construction and conclusive in its ending. Where in other places absent information is like rust that has eaten away too much at the structure, here the absences we have make the text spongey, so that the imagination can enter into it all the better. It is the longest chapter in the book, and the most horrible. “Lyodik, or Silence”, is the story of a young man, Lyodik, who is in the Leningrad region during the siege. Stepanova has not only his own letters, but also the memoirs of those who were fighting in the region or just trying to survive, such as the writer and critic Lydia Ginzburg. Using these other sources to provide context, she uses Lyodik’s letters back home to give a kind of negative of Lyodik’s life, where what is important is what is not said, or said indirectly: a hospital visit he claims is for tonsilitis is almost certainly because of a war wound; the starvation and deprivation of the civilians (including relatives he visits in the besieged city) is something he can only hint at. And then finally, alongside a description of a battle from a memoirist, we have the official letter confirming Lyodik’s death. And then the death of his father, also fighting, soon afterwards. Such hammer blows need no further context or commentary. They are the kind of thing that makes you put the book down and step outside.

In Memory of Memory has its innocent working hypothesis, that everyone survived, that all was well in spite of the 20th century’s storms, but Stepanova’s discoveries in the end do not lead in this direction. (The Second World War / Great Patriotic War was always going to be the exception by the sheer weight of bodies it took into itself.) In the book’s third part the correction to the other notions comes. There’s a relative among the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by the Romanians when Odessa was occupied, and another, a manufacturer in Kherson, who seems to survive the changes in power during the Revolution, but at the cost of everything he owned. While looking for clues, Stepanova finds a comic note in an article but little more: “in his old age the former factory owner Gurevich, sitting in the warm sun, said laughingly that he remembered the war and the revolution, but he couldn’t recall making a present of his factory to the Communist Petrovsky”.

Another relative manages to survive the Revolution by joining the “special task units”, a kind of volunteer militia for the new state. There are no photos or documents, but “the terrible scars on his stomach and back, traces of something that pierced him through, are proof enough.” This man, later, burns his documents and paintings in 1938 because he believes that he will soon be taken away to an interrogation that may end his life. It does not happen. A doctor in the family, at the time of the “Doctors’ Plot”, where Stalin began systematically murdering Jews in the medical profession, somehow survives that too. (Thankfully, Stalin croaked first).

What may be a simple hypothesis is undermined by the sense that it does not really cover what matters. They survived, yes, but traumatised. The man who lost his factories also lost his family, who didn’t seem to want anything to do with him for reasons we cannot even guess for lack of evidence. There were the older familial patriarchs who watched in anguish as newer generations left the Jewish faith and even married other ethnicities. And then there are the smaller traumas, the people who won’t or can’t talk to each other for whatever reason. Can we really speak about a happy family when Stepanova’s conclusion is that “the more I think about our family history, the more it seems like a series of unfulfilled dreams.”

Stepanova, like Sebald, is memory-obsessed. Like Sebald, she lives like a ghost in the narrative, an “I” which is more “eye” than flesh-and-blood actor. Where she differs from the German is in her unease, which grows in the book. She goes back, she finds answers, she crafts narratives, tells stories. But the whole project seems to rot as she writes it. She realises that even as she is trying to remember, to bring justice, she’s also doing something wrong. She sees herself as a kind of exploiter of trauma, a little bit like the accusations that have been thrown at Sebald since his own death. “The dead have no rights: their property and the circumstances of their fate can be used by anyone and in any way.”

That is the theory, but it is not a moral thing to take lives and manipulate them, even when that manipulation is just an attempt to tell the truth. Stepanova sees the dead as being another group which we must soon come to treat with respect, the same way humanity had to come to treat slaves, and women, and certain ethnic, sexual, or religious groups with respect. What this would look like, I’m not sure either of us knows. What is clear is that “we, the people of the past and the present, are endlessly vulnerable, desperately interesting, utterly defenceless. Especially after we are gone”. That is precisely why things must change. There’s a powerful moment when she is trying to force her father to let her include some letters he wrote in a “not-a-chapter” section and he refuses, saying that the past was not really as he wrote it. “I was prepared to betray my own living father for the dead text.” Unlike the dead, he has a voice to refuse. The obvious implication is that they too, if they could, would have their reservations.

In Memory of Memory is not just the story of a Russian Jewish family, nor yet alone Stepanova’s reflections on the ethics of memory. The book is so much broader than that in its range. With its dialogues with French, American, German cultures and cultural figures (among others), it’s a book that consciously refuses the box some might prepare for it: as “Russian culture”, or “Jewish memory culture”. I learned, for example, about the box maker, Joseph Cornell, the photographer Francesca Woodman, the artist Charlotte Saloman. This is a book about trauma and the past, not just in the Russian or Russian-Jewish context. Its questions and answers touch all of us, drag all of us into the whirlpool.

“Kill the yids and save Russia”, a charming stranger says to Stepanova at a railway station, shortly after the Soviet Union has collapsed. It’s all still here, this trauma, this need, this obligation, to remember, to do better, not just for the Jews, but for all of us. At least we can be grateful that we have such a beautifully written and powerfully argued book to help us begin to do so.