The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

232 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

women are idle trophy wives at home but when they are out shoveling icy snowdrifts and pouring asphalt “that is then pressed by a steamroller driven by a

man.”15

By the 1970s, women’s voices were louder and ranged more widely. One of the most astute belongs to Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (b. 1938), playwright, poet, and prose writer, whose own devastated childhood in children’s homes, on the edges of war and surrounded by the Terror, shapes her dark vision and style.16 Hers is a Dostoevskian “underground” voice, lodged inside a first-person perspective that thoroughly distrusts the natural world as well as other human beings. One of Petrushevskaya’s best stories, “Our Crowd” [“Svoi krug,” lit. “One’s own circle”] (written 1979, publ. 1988) opens on the words of the Underground Man, slightly modified but in the same arrogant, abject stream of consciousness: “I’m a hard harsh person, always with a smile on my full rosy lips and a sneer for everyone . . . I’m very smart. What I don’t understand just doesn’t exist.”17

There is this important difference, however. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is to such an extent a shade, an abstract philosophy, that his ailments, inner-organ complaints, and toothaches are all sensed to be metaphysical, which is to say,notsensedatall.Whenhetellsusthat“hethinks hisliverisdiseased”buthe’s not goingtodoctors–tohellwithdoctors–we appreciatethisinformationmore as an ideological position than a medical problem. The first-person narrator of “Our Crowd” does not just speak of disease but appears to be dying from it (probably some severe form of diabetes, as we learn in an offhand way): “in a single winter I’d lost both parents, with mother dying of the same kidney disease that some time ago had begun to show up in me and which starts with blindness” (p. 14). The plot of this story, punctuated by random violence and left unexplained to those who most need to know it (if their sympathy is to be aroused), is her attempt to find among her friends a surrogate mother for her soon-to-be-orphaned son.

Petrushevskaya’s universe is grim and unsentimental. It is also strongly anti-Tolstoyan, in its rejection of all benign, coordinating narrative authority and all hope for a spark or leap of communication between human beings. For reasons quite different from those of Evgeny Shvarts, she has a passion for the fairytale and haswritten several collections for adults. Inher handsit becomes a mechanical, faceless, morally blank genre. Her experimental plays, very popular in the 1970s, were produced by amateur student theatre groups before any official journal dared publish her prose (the Lenin Komsomol Theatre caused a sensation with Three Girls in Blue, her redo of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, in 1985). In Petrushevskaya’s anatomical materialism, bodies are not transfigured. They routinely vomit, urinate, sweat, and bleed. But these bodies are not mere