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.