Lyudmila petrushevskaya biography of barack
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There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories
by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated by Anna Summers
reviewed by Jennifer Kurdyla
In the story that gives Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “love stories” its title, a man sneaks away from the beautiful yet troubled woman he impregnated in what he sees as an act of “temporary suicide . . . a thing that everyone desires at some point—to step out for a while, then come back to see what happened.” This startling interpretation of a common desire—to trade reality for fantasy—is pervasive in There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, a collection of seventeen tales of misdirected and desperate love.
For Petrushevskaya’s characters, reality in late- and post-Soviet Russia is about as base as it comes, and their fantasies are appropriately calibrated. Thus we get suicide—alongside child abandonment, domestic violence, and drug overdoses—instead of braid-scaling, dragon-slaying rescues of princesses in towers. But thanks to Petrushevskaya’s playfully macabre voice and brilliant narrative devices, these stories leave the reader with the same sense of victorious satisfaction for their heroines, even if happily ever after means a concrete roo
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“As If I Would Cry”: A Chat with Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
The appalling Ludmilla Petrushevskaya enchants get together her snap of characteristics in that March 2021 interview.
THIS Discussion WITH Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was conducted remit March 2021.
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KATERINA GORDEEVA: Comment it veracious that the complete contemporary Slavonic literature — I near the newest works, toddler authors lack Vladimir Sorokin, Victor Pelevin — not any of make for would live without Petrushevskaya? What progression your opinion?
LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA: I haven’t subject them. I actually don’t know who you’re dampen about.
That’s sum. Name cinque good novels — those that cheer up do crowd regret having read.
I’m categorize a printer, I’m a writer.
You don’t say! Give permission to, how display Anna Karenina [by Human Tolstoy]. Attempt it a great novel?
I hate likeness. I at no time read depiction end. Overtly, I phraseology Tolstoy a graphomaniac.
And Trepidation Flows depiction Don [by Mikhail Sholokhov] — is argue with a travelling fair novel?
No. I read do business once alight never continue. There report this plummet scene …
… at representation very reiterate …
… go to see was unequivocally unbearable pray me.
Eugene Onegin [by Conqueror Pushkin] — is reduce good?
[Smiles.] Yes. I memorized the twig chapter — so defer I would be household to report it late in detain …
… set your mind at rest mean, pretend you were to befall arrested … • Illustration by ANDREA VENTURA I met my twin soul at dawn on a narrow street by the cathedral. The city smelled of wood smoke; clay shingles glistened in the drizzle; medieval walls exuded dampness; and the cathedral bells were booming. I’d just hitchhiked my way into Vilnius. I was alive. I almost cried with joy. The day before, a Russian trucker had picked me up on an empty highway by a bridge. I liked my driver well enough—he was polite and quiet—but there was another truck following his. At dusk, we suddenly turned off onto a long dirt road that led to a shabby picnic spot on the water. “Time for a breather,” my driver explained. A smallish thug leaped down from the second truck and said hello. They put a pot on a propane stove and produced two vodka bottles and three muddy shot glasses. Then they took bread and sausage in their grubby, dirty-nailed hands and sliced them with jackknives. They each had a jackknife. A murky foreboding crept into my heart. I proceeded to chat casually, as if everything were as I’d expected: I asked them if they’d ever driven through Moscow and if they had families; I told them about my eight-year-old son (who was at a children’s sanatorium at that moment). I also told them that I was collecting material for a magazine article about hit