Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Career

Petrushevskaya is regarded as one of Russia's most prominent contemporary writers, and one of the most acclaimed writers at work in Eastern Europe; Publishers Weekly has stated that she is "generally considered to be one of the finest living Russian writers." In recent decades, her work has become increasingly well-known in the West. Her writing combines postmodernist trends with the psychological insights and parodic touches of writers such as Anton Chekhov.

She spent most of her early career until perestroika writing and putting on plays rather than novels and stories, as the theater censorship was often less strict than written work. She recounts, nevertheless, being frequently monitored by the KGB and facing resistance from Soviet censors to having her work performed. In an interview with the Financial Times, she recalls presenting an early work of prose to the prominent literary journal Novy Mir, and having it deemed too risky to publish: “They said they couldn’t protect me. Those were very bloody times... If they had published me, I would have had a terrible fame. It would have been dangerous. I would have ended up in prison." Nevertheless, she produced several respected plays, one of the most prominent of which is Andante. Additionally, in 1979, she was a co-writer for the influential Russian animated film, Tale of Tales; her influence in Russian film continued when she served as a jury member in the 3rd Open Russian Festival of Animated Film in 1998.

Following Gorbachev-era governmental reforms, she began to publish novels and short stories that she had previously kept to herself. With her first collection of stories, Immortal Love, she "became a household name virtually overnight," and was published in Novy Mir as she had been unable to do so only a couple of decades earlier. Other later works include the novels The Time: Night (1992) and The Number One, both short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. Since the late 1980s, her plays, stories and novels have been published in more than 30 languages, and she has earned several accolades. In 2003, she was awarded the Pushkin Prize in Russian literature by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Germany. She was additionally awarded the Russian State Prize for arts in 2004, the Stanislavsky Award in 2005, and the Triumph Prize in 2006.

There Once Lived a Woman who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby, a short story collection, was published in the U.S. by Penguin Books in October 2009 and became a New York Times Book Review bestseller in December. In 2010, it won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. The first major translation of her work by an American publisher, the stories often contain mystical or allegorical elements illuminating bleak Soviet and post-Soviet living conditions. The collection of stories has been well reviewed, buttressing Petrushevskaya's reputation in the English-speaking world. An article in Dissent called the collection "a striking introduction to the author's work."

"Petrushevskaya's stories could easily be read as bleak grotesques, populated by envious neighbors, selfish adolescents, and parents who overcompensate with exaggerated love. But ultimately, Petrushevskaya's skillful juxtapositions yield glints of light. Resilience and ingenuity thread through the hardship, whether through forgiveness or love. Such traces of humanity are starker—and brighter—because of the darkness surrounding them."

This collection was followed in 2013 by a second English language book, There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself, and the 2017 memoir The Girl from the Metropol Hotel.

Petrushevskaya tends to shy away from praise of her literary achievements--in a 1993 interview with Sally Laird, she said, "Russia is a land of women Homers, women who tell their stories orally, just like that, without inventing anything. They're extraordinarily talented storytellers. I'm just a listener among them." According to Viv Gruskop, she has also responded to her fame by stating, "It has nothing to do with me."

In her late 60s, Petrushevskaya started a singing career, creating new lyrics for her favorite songs. Since 2008, she has been regularly performing as a cabaret singer in Moscow (from nightclubs to major venues such as the Moscow House of Music) and across Russia, as well as internationally. She is known to sing French and German jazz songs, and recently has begun writing her own.

Petrushevskaya is also known as a visual artist; her portraits, nudes, and still life have been shown in Russia's major museums, including the Tretyakov Gallery, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and State Museum of Literature, and private galleries.

In 2023, Petrushevskaya announced that as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine she was not longer able to write, posting to social media that "This aggressive war, the sudden and inexplicable hatred by the majority of our (Russophone) nation for our neighbors and family, the Ukrainian people, have put an end to my profession."