From the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, the masterly novellas that established her as one of the greatest living Russian writers—including a new translation of the modern classic The Time Is Night “Love them, they’ll torture you; don’t love them, they’ll leave you anyway.” After her work was suppressed for many years, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya won wide recognition for capturing the experiences of everyday Russians with profound pathos and mordant wit. Among her most famous and controversial works, these three novellas—The Time Is Night, Chocolates with Liqueur (inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”), and Among Friends—are modern classics that breathe new life into Tolstoy’s famous dictum, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Together they confirm the genius of an author with a gift for turning adversity into art.
“One of Russia’s best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next.” —The New York Times At first glance, the stories in The New Adventures of Helen seems simple, even child-like, but a deep reading reveals satire and darkness manifested through classic fairy tale tropes characteristically upended by Petrushevskaya. These “adult fairy tales” ask deep questions about gender, love, history, memory, and the future, taking place in times between history and the now. These stories, quirky but yet inspired by a confident hopefulness, will inspire and provoke English-speaking readers across the globe.
Love stories, with a twist, by Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction writer—the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel By turns sly and sweet, burlesque and heartbreaking, these realist fables of women looking for love are the stories that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya—who has been compared to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Beckett, Poe, Angela Carter, and even Stephen King—is best known for in Russia. Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, by people across the life span: one-night stands in communal apartments, poignantly awkward couplings, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, elopements, tentative courtships, and rampant infidelity, shot through with lurid violence, romantic illusion, and surprising tenderness. With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace and shows just why she is Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction writer.
New York Times Bestseller Winner of the World Fantasy Award One of New York magazine’s 10 Best Books of the Year One of NPR’s 5 Best Works of Foreign Fiction The celebrated scary fairy tales of Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction writer—the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Vanishings and aparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia—or anywhere else in the world—today.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography The prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. “From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —Anna Summers, from the Introduction
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been acclaimed as one of Russia's greatest living writers. These five dreamlike and blackly comic stories, two of which are here in English for the first time, tell of lost children, midnight forests, strange transformations, cruel curses, grief and resilience, in the darkest of modern fairy tales.
This book is the first interdisciplinary treatment of the mythic image of the Decembrists, a group of Russian noble officers who attempted, but failed, to overthrow the tsarist government in 1825. By exploring Russian literature, history, film and opera this book shows how the Decembrist myth evolved over time depending on political agendas. Though originally it functioned as a myth of opposition to authority and espoused self-sacrifice, it later became a legitimating myth for the Soviet regime. Ludmilla Trigos reveals how the Decembrist myth inspired generations of Russian revolutionaries and writers and still retains its hold on the Russian cultural imagination.
From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, New York Times bestselling author and Russia’s greatest living absurdist, comes an elaborate family drama, social satire, and burlesque of twists, coincidences, and hijinks. Kidnapped is a madcap crime spree that caroms from crisis to crisis, through lands real and imagined. It tells the tale of Sergei Sertsov, not one but two boys from Moscow with more than just a name in common, and the women who go to great lengths to protect them. The story unfurls in a whirlwind of deceit and double crossing—babies are switched at birth, documents forged, palms greased, identities assumed, deaths faked, and authorities duped. Across decades and continents, the narrative veers from a trade office in tropical Handia, to Russia as it plunges through perestroika and into post-Soviet free fall, to a mansion in opulent Montegasco at the start of the twenty-first century. With a dizzying array of characters and settings, Kidnapped is a hilarious saga of determined women triumphing over their many oppressors to save the people they love.
A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife�s face; and a distraught father brings his daughter back to life by eating human hearts in his dreams. In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths and haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales.
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Il y a une forme féminine, là-bas derrière le champ des mots, qui s’installe dans la lumière. C’est elle. Elle parle. Elle murmure en « Marine ». Je la connais bien et je sais qu’elle n’y connaît rien. Elle n’est là que par amour. Imaginez-la. Elle vient de la terre champenoise, des marais, de l’eau stagnante, de ceux qui n’acceptent l’image de l’eau vive qu’à l’intérieur de lourdes constructions de pierre où résident leurs croyances. Ludmilla est née dans ce monde-là, de ce monde-là. Enfant, elle n’avait pas d’horizon. Elle l’écrit dans son dernier recueil L’usage de la parole. Elle ne cherchait des trésors que dans la cave imaginaire. Cachée dans le regard du père, étouffée dans le silence de la mère, elle a dormi longtemps « du sommeil du monde ». Mais l’aube est venue et « au réveil, j’assiste au réveil ébahi de l’eau » Elle nous fait partager cette émotion si douce qui la porte vers l’Ailleurs. Martine Swertvaegher
Portraiture as a genre is receiving increased attention at the same time that public curiosity about science is reaching unprecedented levels. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 14 April – 17 September 2000, and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, from 27 September – 10 December 2000, Defining Features brings portraiture and science together. Ludmilla Jordanova's lucid text reflects on the nature of the relationship between art, science, medicine and technology by focusing on a selection of portraits that spans more than three centuries. Illustrated with likenesses of such notable personalities as Edward Jenner, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Dorothy Hodgkin, and encompassing a variety of media from paintings and medals to bookmarks and key rings, Defining Features charts changing attitudes towards medical practice and scientific investigation, as well as exploring how notions of gender, heroism, popularization and celebrity have affected the public's understanding of how researchers do their work.
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