Humiliated and insulted

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya turns 80 on May 26

Plays, stories, stories of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya never belonged to the category of "women's literature". She is not a writer, but a writer. Marble, golden letters of names, Eternity. Force breaking through to the foundations of being. Of our contemporaries who write now, and the ink has not dried up yet, only two are quite classics, and in some places even geniuses. Vladimir Sorokin and Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. And both, by the way, do not climb either on the screens or to the powers that be. Both are staunch democrats, intellectuals, elected representatives. But Petrushevskaya did not exchange for party lists and did not climb into the stands. The rules of the craft, so that, according to Blok, "from the walking truth, everything becomes painful and light."

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is, of course, the Russian Flannery O'Connor. Only here the latter writes about exceptions to the rules. Her Evil, her freaks and monsters are not typical of America. This is her bottom, her nightmares, nightmares - nightly troubles. And Petrushevskaya's utter stories are mainstream, this is everyday life, hungry and miserable Soviet everyday life. And all - humiliated and offended. Moral cripples. And all, like Galich, "born in a straitjacket."

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is a writer from Dostoyevsky's karass. It's just that Soviet (and post-Soviet) reality is very small fragments of Fyodor Mikhailovich's blocks. No one is looking for anything anymore: there are no titans of the spirit, there is no well-fed and almost completely free intelligentsia, there are no common ideas and ideals, there is not even a search for them. All this is the property of the Silver Age. It's all there, before 1917. Now, if Dostoevsky was resurrected and born in the same year as Petrushevskaya, and if he remembered the Great Terror from 1917 to 1953 by the memory of his grandfather, mother, father, then, I assure you, he would write like Lyudmila Stefanovna. Only she never taught anyone anything, she didn’t publish The Epoch and The Citizen, she didn’t see the God-bearing people, and she didn’t voice this comforting myth.

Here it is, the main secret revealed by Petrushevskaya: Soviet reality has deprived people of their souls. Too hard, nowhere to put the soul, everything is absorbed by the backbreaking work of survival.

Of the "Three Girls in Blue" - two are just shrews, and everything from poverty, and the dacha is miserable, and there is no one to repair the roof, and the outhouse is needed, but there is not enough money for everything. And they chase their third sister, Irina, who knows the Gaelic language, but receives 120 rubles with the hope of 140, and her Pavlik grows up without caviar and without a father. And all the joys: an escape with a lover to the south. But the lover will kick him out, rudely, boorishly, and the mother will end up in the hospital, and Pavlik has nowhere to go. And Irina, after an unsuccessful escape, will again go to bow to the harpy sisters, all at the same damned dacha. Poverty teaches humility.

Yes, "Time is Night" is not the title of one story, it is simply the shortest summary of Petrushevskaya's entire work. If Dostoevsky's heroes drink like Marmeladov, walk like Mitya Karamazov, kill like Rodion Raskolnikov, then most of Petrushevskaya's heroes want to work, behave decently, but cannot feed themselves. The poetess Anna ("Time is Night") cannot feed her grandson with meat, except perhaps at a party. And the son after prison drank himself and disappeared, and the daughter is a single mother, and the mother is in a boarding school for the chroniclers. How to earn? How to live?

Petrushevskaya is our Dante and Virgil at once, she will lead us through all the circles of hell: here is the execution, here is a meeting with a suicide bomber, here is the end of the world (“New Robinsons”), here is the icy hell of a distant taiga people (“Number One, or In the gardens of other possibilities ”), and we can thunder there. Meanness, cruelty, betrayal.

We don't need to lie, we don't want consolation. We will follow Ludmila Petrushevskaya. “Pour us a cup, O wise Socrates, pour us hemlock” (N. Boltyanskaya).

First published in NT #21, May 26, 2008