Sometimes a Small Redemption
A review by Alexandra Schwartz
"Russian literature has been a kind of religion in this country -- a religion based on the moral position of writers, on their suffering," Ludmilla Petrushevskaya once told Sally Laird, her British translator. "All our greatest writers have been sufferers and saints." It was May 1987, and Immortal Love, Petrushevskaya's first collection of short stories, would be published the following year, just in time for her fiftieth birthday. If suffering really could be considered a legitimate qualification for literary greatness, Petrushevskaya had more than earned her due. A year after she was born in 1938, her father abandoned the family, leaving her in Moscow with her mother, the daughter of an eminent linguistics professor. Stalin's Great Purge was under way, and her mother's relatives, old-time Bolshevik intellectuals involved in the revolution, were summarily rounded up for arrest and execution. Though the surviving family members managed to escape during World War II to Kuibyshev, the...
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