THE LITTLE GIRL FROM THE METROPOL (Malenkaya devochka iz “Metropolia”)

• An autobiographical novella
• 103 pp
• 2006
• Publishers: Amphora, St Petersburg
• Agent: Julia Goumen
• Co-agent to World English: Sarah Chalfant, The Wylie Agency

This is not a typical fiction memoir. Through the prism of the story of her family, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya draws a compelling portrait of the era of communist Russia.

With brilliant precision and telling details, Petrushevskaya draws a gallery of portraits of the Muscovite intelligentsia as they struggle to survive in the new—poverty-stricken and ignorant—country. The author recalls her beautiful grandmother, whom the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was in love with; her great-aunt, lover of head-of-state Mikhail Kalinin; and her grandfather, a celebrated linguist, one of the fathers of the Moscow linguistic circle. These characters are set next to violent and ruthless neighbors who attack Ludmilla’s grandmother with an axe when she wants to use the bathroom in their communal flat, and beat Ludmilla if she is found rummaging in their slop-pail for the remains of food. The 8-year-old girl grows up in the company of fatherless boys, homeless beggars and war invalids that crowded the streets of Saratov (then Kuibyshev), where her family lived as evacuees during the war.

As the story of a small girl in the hungry post-war years unfolds, the fate of the enormous country appears before the reader—a country where the magical is intertwined with the mundane, beautiful and refined neighbor with terrible ones, and despair with hope. A family forest grows out of Petrushevskaya’s memoir, one in which each tree is at once “a child, a parent, and a personality”.

Trans.: Christian Bourgois Editeur (French)