Review by New York Times Review
Russian literature is replete with powerful memoirs of childhood: Tolstoy, Gorky, Nabokov, Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva all wrote movingly and insightfully about growing up. And yet, when one looks for texts about children's lives after the Communist revolution, the bookshelf seems strangely empty. Where are the great memoirs of Soviet childhood? Perhaps the traditional narrative approach taken by Tolstoy or Nabokov cannot effectively depict the spare, hungry life of a child in a totalitarian state. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's slender, fragmentary memoir, "The Girl From the Metropol Hotel," is strangely much closer in tone and craft to Soviet absurdist poetry than it is to these classic memoirs. That poetry is exemplified by authors such as Daniil Kharms and Aleksander Vvedensky, known for their farcical depictions of early Soviet life in all its casual brutality. The reader feels the echo of such poems when Petrushevskaya's younger self, a girl who's been desperately hungry for most of her life, finds herself in possession of a fistful of silver coins. What does she do? She throws them into the courtyard, watching with a smile as dirty boys swarm to retrieve them, as each dropped coin "caused a new explosion of howling and fighting." If this memoir of growing up on the streets of the Soviet Union follows a logic, it is the violent, chaotic logic of Soviet history itself. As the girl from the Metropol Hotel, Petrushevskaya was born into an elite Bolshevik family in 1938, in the midst of great misfortune: Several family members were executed by Stalin's firing squads. The family became "enemies to everyone," Petrushevskaya writes, "to our neighbors, to the police, to the janitors, to the passers-by, to every resident of our courtyard of any age. We were not allowed to use the shared bathroom, to wash our clothes, and we didn't have soap anyway. At the age of 9 I was unfamiliar with shoes, with handkerchiefs, with combs; I did not know what school or discipline was." Petrushevskaya's young mother leaves her with her ill grandmother during World War II, and the lonely child wanders from street to street, from one short chapter to another, looking for food in the neighbor's garbage. Her aunt brings home potato peels from the compost heap, which her grandmother bakes on their Primus stove. That's dinner. Her grandmother's consolation comes in the form of reading aloud from Gogol's stories. When 9-yearold Ludmilla runs away, she survives street life by reciting those pages of Gogol by heart. "I didn't beg by holding out a hand on street corners," she writes, "I performed like Édith Piaf." The translator Anna Summers's inspired introductory essay helps to present this book as a memoir of war, events therein echoing the misfortunes currently inflicted on other young girls from Ukraine to Syria and beyond. In this context, Petrushevskaya's powerful memoir reminds us that, as Ingeborg Bachmann once wrote, "war is no longer declared, / it is continued." Like a stained-glass Chagall window, Petrushevskaya's Soviet-era memoir creates a larger panorama out of tiny, vivid chapters, shattered fragments of different color and shape. She throws the misery of her daily life into relief through the use of fairy-tale metaphors familiar to fans of her fiction: At the end of a chapter about being mistreated by other children at the sanitarium, she writes: "The circle of animal faces had never crushed the girl; it remained behind, among the tall trees of the park, in the enchanted kingdom of wild berries." Ultimately, the girl emerges not only uncrushed but one of Russia's best, and most beloved, contemporary authors, which brings to mind Auden's famous words about Yeats: "Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry." This memoir shows us how Soviet life hurt Ludmilla Petrushevskaya into crystalline prose. ? ilya Kaminsky is the author of "Dancing in Odessa" and the co-editor of "The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry." He teaches English and comparative literature at San Diego State University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
In times of extreme deprivation, the small symbols of normalcy we hold close to ourselves give us the strength to carry on. Petrushevskaya (There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children until They Moved Back In, 2014) drives home this point eloquently in her moving memoir. The daughter of Russian intelligentsia, she was forced to flee with her family from Moscow's elite Metropol Hotel to distant Kuibyshev in a cattle car as the storm clouds of WWII grew ever darker. Foraging in trash for cabbage leaves to make soup and skipping school because she had no shoes, Petrushevskaya still longed for a doll she could call her own, an object that could tether her to some sense of comfort amid all the starkness. Through such fragmented episodes, Petrushevskaya succeeds in showing just how off-the-bell-curve her extraordinary life has been. That she grew up to be a gifted writer, learning to read from newspapers left in the trash, is proof that the brightest, most fiery diamonds are forged under extreme pressure.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this memoir, acclaimed novelist Petrushevskaya (There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby) recounts her impoverished Moscow childhood with a blend of dark humor and clipped, piercing realism. She was born in 1938 to a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who lived in Moscow's preeminent Metropol Hotel. Petrushevskaya, along with her mother, aunt, and grandmother, soon had to flee the city for Kuibyshev in 1941, when the family was deemed "enemies of the people." Leaving Moscow on a cattle car at the start of the war was downright luxurious compared to the near-starvation that Petrushevskaya and her family suffered for years to come, with Petrushevskaya taking to begging on the street, often pretending to be an orphan or disabled. But despite the hardships she endured, her impish spirit flourished and she ran around the streets, shoeless but never beaten down. After returning to Moscow at age nine, a wild child, she was sent to a series of summer camps in an effort to civilize her (they were not entirely successful); despite mediocre grades in college, she still managed to squeak by with a degree in journalism. The definition of incorrigible and indomitable, both on the page and in her life, Petrushevskaya shows that even in the harshest of circumstances, spirited determination can prevail. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Autobiography of an acclaimed Russian writer who grew up "hungrier, dirtier, and colder than everyone else."In a lively, irreverent memoir, journalist and fiction writer Petrushevskaya (There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In, 2014, etc.), known for her subversive fairy tales, recalls a nightmarish childhood. She was born in 1938 in Moscow's Metropol Hotel, the city's "most famed residential building." While she was still an infant, her family members, Bolshevik intellectuals, were deemed "enemies of the people." In 1941, she, her mother, grandmother, and aunt fled Moscow in a cattle car for Kuibyshev, where they were treated as "pariahs, untouchables." In gritty detail, the author depicts their precarious life during the war. Always starving, the author "ate glue in secret because of the rumor that it was flavored with real cherries." The family foraged in neighbors' garbage, and her aunt made soup from cabbage leaves picked up from the ground at the market. Dirty, "shaggy, covered with lice and bedbug bites," for a time she begged in the streets, once pretending to be crippled. After the war, she and her mother were able to return to the Metropol, but by then she was "an unmanageable, wild child" and therefore unwelcome at the hotel. She was sent to a summer camp, which nurtured her "hatred of constant supervision and collectivism of any kind, and at the same time admiration to the point of tears at the sight of a marching squad." Feisty and incorrigible, Petrushevskaya managed to get through high school, despite earning low grades, and she went on to study journalism in college. "We had to read endless tomes on the Communist press, primarily by Lenin," she writes. "We were being trained to become ideologically sound ignoramuses," but she was determined to get a diploma so that she could work as a professional journalist. With spunk and defiance, she survived, and transcended, the privations of her youth. A terse, spirited memoir that reads like a picaresque novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
