Fantastical stories

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby

Indeed, with editors refusing to print her stories for fear of government censure, Petrushevskaya languished in obscurity until the fall of the USSR heralded her rise as a major force in modern Russian letters.

Though she is best known for grim, realist tales of Soviet life, often in the form of acidic female monologues, those are not what are on offer here. Subtitled Scary Fairy Tales, this volume collects the mystical and fantastical stories which Petrushevskaya has been writing throughout her life.

The first major translation of her work into English, There Once Lived a Woman … comprises dark and surreal vignettes imbued with mystical and allegorical elements. There are symbolic pieces about the collapse of socio-political order and gentler stories which explore human relationships stressed to the limits by impossible, frequently supernatural circumstances.

Acknowledging Russia’s oral storytelling tradition, many of Petrushevskaya’s stories take place in what might be thought of as Once-Upon-a-Time-Land: ‘There once lived a woman who was so fat she couldn’t fit in a taxi,’ begins Marilena’s Secret; ‘There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life,’ begins The Fountain House. The clear standout is The New Robinson Crusoes, originally published in Novy Mir alongside extracts of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in 1989 as Soviet censorship entered its terminal phase. Billed as a ‘chronicle of the end of the 20th century’, this unsettling post-apocalyptic spin on the Russian tradition of the Dacha holiday depicts a man’s struggles to keep his family and neighbours one step ahead of the refugees pouring out of the cities.

Equipped with “a rifle, skis and smart dog”, a “boy and a girl for the continuation of the race, a cat who brought us mice from the forest,” and “a grandmother — the storehouse of the people’s wisdom and knowledge,” this ad hoc community refuse to lose hope, give up stubbornness, or discard any of the attributes which make them human.

Stories such as this can stand beside the best of modern writing, yet the urban folk tales comprising the first portion of the collection suffer badly from repetitive, predictable twists.

At her best she lays bare the absurdities of Soviet life through bleak, darkly comic occurrences: a mother finds a tiny child in a head of cabbage and tries to discover why it isn’t growing; a crooked monk pursues garish cowboys along the backroads of Russia.

On balance, There Once Lived a Woman… is an excellent introduction to one of modern Russia’s most interesting and uncompromising writers.