The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

From the first Thaw to the end 233

vehicles for substance abuse or casual suffering; they are symbolic of damage done to the spirit.18

In Petrushevskaya’s most ambitious piece of prose, The Time: Night (1992), the depth of this damage is made clear, as is her status as “pessimistic relativist.” The Underground, a valueless dead end, is always pessimistic and relativistic. But being a woman and mother appears to worsen the conditions and raise the costs. The heroine of The Time: Night is a mediocre poet and hack journalist, Anna Adrianovna, who seeks an identity by surrounding herself with literary quotations. She worships her “namesake,” the great poet Anna Akhmatova, boasts of her girlish thinness (so like Akhmatova in her youth), and more than once hints at her desire to write herself into the suffering Mother at the Foot of the Cross that crowns the magnificent poetic cycle, “Requiem.” Her negative role models are taken from Tolstoy. As caregiver for her grandson Tima, dropped on her when her daughter’s shotgun marriage fell apart, she remarks:

Of course she [her daughter Alyona] never lets on who she’s living with or whether she’s got a man at all; all she does when she comes here is weep. It was Anna Karenina all over again, the lost mother reunited with her son – and me of course in the role of Karenin.19

Of Russia’s many reworked “Anna stories,” Anna Adrianovna is the most awful. If Chekhov in the 1890s had provided clinical and lyrical variants on the characters in Tolstoy’s great novel, pushing their plots up into the light of day, Petrushevskaya in the late Soviet period remains deep in the Underground. This feminized Underground is marked by certain features that Dostoevsky’s hero, or anti-hero, did not have to face. Apart from his brief contacts with Liza, the Underground Man hurts most of all himself – and Liza, after his final insult to her, will not come back. She understands that he has no capacity for sustained mutual relations of any sort. Underground women can hurt themselves too, of course, but given the range of their family duties (and cramped living quarters) in the Soviet context, usually they hurt others first, and far more effectively. These others are often children. And the adults come back.

Anna Adrianovna is matriarch of an apartment in which her entire dysfunctional family is “registered.” (In the Soviet era, the state provided its legally employed citizens with living quarters and regulated the square meters available to each resident.) Among those registered in this space are Anna’s mother (later moved to apsychiatric wardandthen to amentalhospital),herson Andrei (just back from two years in prison and still pursued by his criminal buddies), her daughter Alyona (who, after off-loading Tima, produces two more illegitimate children in the course of the novel). Petrushevskaya obscures chronology