Ludmilla Petrushevskaya - The girl from the Metropol Hotel: growing up in communist Russia

Acclaim for Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Petrushevskaya writes instant classics.

The Daily Beast

Petrushevskaya is the Tolstoy of the communal kitchen.... She is not, like Tolstoy, writing of war, or, like Dostoyevsky, writing of criminals on the street, or, like poet Anna Akhmatova or novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, noting the extreme suffering of those sent to the camps. Rather, she is bearing witness to the fight to survive the everyday.... [She is] dazzlingly talented and deeply empathetic.

Slate

This celebrated Russian author is so disquieting that long after Solzhenitsyn had been published in the Soviet Union, her fiction was bannedeven though nothing about it screams political or dissident or anything else. It just screams.

Elle

Her suspenseful writing calls to mind the creepiness of Poe and the psychological acuity (and sly irony) of Chekhov.

More

Petrushevskayas fiction [offers] a glimpse of what it means to be a human being, living sometimes in bitter misery, sometimes in unexpected grace.

Jenny Offill, The New York Times Book Review

The fact that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is Russias premier writer of fiction today proves that the literary tradition that produced Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Babel is alive and well.

Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast

What distinguishes the author is her compression of language, her use of detail and her powerful visual sense. Time Out New York

A master of the Russian short story.

Olga Grushin, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov

There is no other writer who can blend the absurd and the real in such a scary, amazing, and wonderful way.

Lara Vapnyar, author of There Are Jews in My House

One of the greatest writers in Russia today and a vital force in contemporary world literature.

Ken Kalfus, author of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

A master of the short story form, a kindred spirit to writers like Angela Carter and Yumiko Kurahashi.

Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble, Magic for Beginners, and Stranger Things Happen

In her best work Petrushevskaya steers a sure course between neutrally recording the degraded life of the Soviet-era urban underclass and ratcheting up the squalor of that life for the mere pleasure of it. She does so by the steadiness of her moral compass and the gaiety of her prose.

J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

PENGUIN BOOKS

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen volumes of prose, including the New York Times bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbors Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York magazines Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPRs Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction; There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sisters Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories; and There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family. A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russias most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement.

Anna Summers is the coeditor and cotranslator of Ludmilla Petrushevskayas There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbors Baby: Scary Fairy Tales as well as the editor and translator of Petrushevskayas There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sisters Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories and There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family. Born in Moscow, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Also by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbors Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sisters Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family

PENGUIN BOOKS

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375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

Copyright 2006 by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Translation and introduction copyright 2017 by Anna Summers

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Originally published in Russian by Amfora, St. Petersburg, 2006.

Image credits: pp. xv, xviii, 46, 86: Wikimedia Commons; p. xvii: still from The Fable of Fables by permission of Soyuzmultfilm Studios; p. 12: photo by Arkady Shaikeht, January 1942, from waralbum.ru; p. 14: photo by Semyon Fridliand, October 1941, from waralbum.ru; pp. 17, 23, 38: photographer unknown, from www.waralbum.ru; p. 27: Slow spring in Strukovsky Garden, by Vladimir Kleschev, 2012. Used with permission of the photographer; pp. 68, 98: From pastvu.com; p. 120: Moscow Courtyard by Sergei Vokov, used with permission by the artist.

All other images courtesy of the author.

Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING - IN - PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Petrushevskaia, Liudmila, author.

Title: The girl from the Metropol Hotel : growing up in communist Russia /

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya ; translated with an introduction by Anna Summers.

Other titles: Malenkaia devochka iz Metropolia. English

Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2017] | Original Russian

edition: 2006.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016031256 (print) | LCCN 2016035280 (ebook) | ISBN

9780143129974 (paperback) | ISBN 9781101993514 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Petrushevskaia, LiudmilaChildhood and youth. |

Petrushevskaia, LiudmilaFamily. | Petrushevskaia,

LiudmilaFriends and associates. | Authors, Russian20th

centuryBiography. | Moscow (Russia) Biography. | Hotel Metropol

(Moscow, Russia) History20th century. | Moscow (Russia) Social life

and customs20th century. | CommunismSocial aspectsSoviet

UnionHistory. | Coming of ageSoviet Union. | Soviet

UnionHistory19251953Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY /

Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | HISTORY /

Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union.

Classification: LCC PG3485.E724 Z4613 2017 (print) | LCC PG3485.E724 (ebook)

| DDC 891.78/4403 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031256

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.