3.26.1996. New York: Pantheon Books. 348 pages. Translated by Sally Laird.

This is how it was, reading thirty-six stories in Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s first published collection of fiction, Immortal Love: she’d start her stories in mid-conversation, sometimes telling the most wayward banalities about her characters and their dreary lives, sometimes lulling you into the laziest of reveries, the kind that make the present seem continuable and stable, as though all will turn out well for these women protagonists bedeviled by society’s judgment and a host of implacable, unfeeling male partners; but just when you thought there would be a satisfying resolution and you and the characters would escape these stories unharmed, Petrushevskaya would then rip your stomach open with a woeful plot twist and leave you going Oomph! and shaking your head at the brutality of it all.

This, Petrushevskyaya’s first book of stories, Abe had read was originally published in 1988 after years of continual rejection of these stories by Soviet publishers due to their presenting a rather negative picture of Soviet domestic life, this being an instantly attention-grabbing detail for Abe, since he too found the domestic life of his own country dissatisfying and therefore was predisposed to sympathize with any potential comrade in the war against social truth and clique-ish mindsets. That Petrushevskaya from her pictures looked like a kooky old bird bothered Abe not at all, for he recalled Tolstoy’s observation that a sort of legitimate physiognomy could be seen in how odd people are shaped by their awareness of being conspicuous in their oddness.

And so Abe went into Immortal Love expecting greatness, having also been primed for nothing less by an enthusiastic write-up of two new translations of the Russian author’s stories by William Deresiewicz in The Nation, in which Deresiewicz intimated Petrushevskaya to be a future candidate for the Nobel Prize, noted her to be acclaimed not only for her fiction but also for plays and (interestingly) as a singer, and mentioned that she is studied in Russian schools and considered by many to be Russia’s greatest living writer (though Abe, having read the same thing said of Mikhail Shishkin, thought it wise to hold off on judgment until he read more of the latter.) Abe was also intrigued by Deresiewicz’s description of the author’s style: her compactness—perhaps like Lydia Davis or Amy Hempel, two other authors admired for compactness—and a narrator who “is rarely specified or individuated” and represents “the voice of the collective—of neighbors, relatives, co-workers—the voice of suspicion and envy, of people getting in each other’s business.” (Hmm.) So Abe sought out a copy of Petrushevskaya’s first book and read it back to front, coming away from Immortal Love’s thirty-six stories feeling exhausted but largely concurring that the author’s contention for a Nobel Prize turned out to be credible after all. He decided an entertaining gimmick to illustrate why he thought so might be if he wrote the entire review in free indirect prose to celebrate Petrushevskaya’s masterful use of the same.

This was a strange choice to say the least. Would Abe’s readers get the gist of what he was doing, or why it was an issue of prime importance in assessing the greatness of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s stories? For much of the charm of these stories (inasmuch as such dismal subject matter could be said to possess charm) lay in the distinct attitudes Petrushevskaya’s narrators exhibited towards her characters, their colloquial phrases and conspicuous lack of the objectivity we normally associate with a third-person narrator.

Abe had seen this sort of third-person narrator before, of course, in any number of Modernists, in the past habitual passages of Flaubert, in the ironic narrators of Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen—“It is a truth universally acknowledged” by the voice of society for whom Austen’s narrator was speaking. But though Abe was familiar with free indirect prose, he knew many readers would not be, and so what better way to explain this somewhat obscure literary/stylistic concept than by demonstrating it? That would be much easier than explaining that free prose was where you eliminate the he said, she thought speech/thought tags that writers use to signal dialogue or thought, and less tedious still than adding that indirect prose was where the narrator conveys what was said without explicitly offering the actual text of the speech, and certainly much easier than outright telling readers that it was by introducing pseudo-speech elements into free and indirect narration that authors would often convey the unspoken thoughts of a character or group of people whose views they wished to parody or sock-puppet with exaggerated mannerisms; no, it would be too didactic for Abe to cram all of that into a review.

But he felt it necessary to discuss the issue, for often this technique was the thing which made the twenty-three stories in Immortal Love‘s first section “Histories,” quite readable despite the fact that they were set in dreary, cramped one-room apartments and office cubicles, with stories typically revolving around mothers of ungrateful sons, wives of indifferent and free-ranging husbands, and innocent flowerbud daughters whose jaded coworkers looked on them with scorn alternating with awe. Yet amid the heartache and perpetual futility experienced by these characters, notes of compassion in these stories told not of malice in this author’s intentions—though malice there is in her narrators—but of rather of love. While they are endlessly gossiped about, laughed at, cheated on, taken advantage of, and gotten rid of, these women are shown in many layers, and the refractions of free indirect prose pared with ambiguous plotting make the stories quite rereadable for those who can stomach the emotional drain.

Some stories began with terrible Arthur Dimmesdale-esque judgments, wherein our prejudicial narrator would pronounce some irrevocable flaw in the main character and shame her before our eyes. Consider, for example, these three statements made about three entirely different characters:

She gave the impression that she didn’t even understand why concealment might sometimes be necessary, why there are certain things you tell only your nearest and dearest—and even then regret telling afterwards. (“The Storyteller”)
. . .
She would lie unrestrainedly, muddle up her own stories, forget what she’d said just the day before and so on. It was a typical, easily recognizable case, fibbing to make oneself look important, presenting all one’s actions as being somehow frightfully significant, of enormous consequence, bound to result in something momentous happening; but in fact nothing did happen. (“The Violin”)
. . .
She’d watch open-mouthed as the chalk was wiped from the blackboard, the sight of it sending her into some deep meditation, but God only knows what she was thinking of at such moments, sitting there gazing at the blackboard. (“Clarissa’s Story”)

Yet also like Dimmesdale, the unfolding of these stories often would show Petrushevskaya’s narrators to themselves be unfair and hypocritical. Galya, who wouldn’t stop telling everyone at the office every tawdry and tragic detail of her personal life, from her mother’s fatal illness to how her father was a tyrant who beat her to the new boy she was dating, was not the only object of scorn in “The Storyteller”; Petrushevskaya used her free indirect narrator to show how cynical and mean-spirited Galya’s co-workers were in how they would ostracize her; then (in a bit of poetic justice), Petrushevskaya had the company boss force these same insider gossips to attend Galya’s wedding. Another memorable story of this type is “Elegy,” in which a husband and wife draw the ire of their coworkers by continually bringing their entire family to dine in the company mess hall, thereafter developing the most absurd and yet endearing dependency on the company.

These narrators, it must be said, were not always unjust to the protagonists either; sometimes, the narrator would attempt some apologetics for the protagonist, even when the protagonist was every bit as rotten as the narrator reluctantly let on:

Who can say what life is like for a quiet woman addicted to drink, who lives hidden away from everyone in a one-room apartment with her child? Who knows what it’s like for her, night after night, no matter how drunk, to gather up all the little things her daughter needs for kindergarten, so they should all be to hand in the morning? (“Another Land”)
. . .
You can say time in time out he’s a finished man, an alcoholic, and that does just about sum him up, but not quite. (“The Ball of the Last Man”)

It had to be admitted, too, that some of Petrushevskaya’s characters blend together. Her female protagonists, while flawed in themselves, were generically describable as society’s dupes, laughed at by coworkers, shown next to no loyalty by husbands (who often need to be bargained with and manipulated merely to prevent them from leaving with another woman), left to raise children alone, and treated as disposable. Yet Petrushevskaya, like a high-powered legal advocate, carefully considers the multiple sides of these women’s circumstances; she doesn’t think their lives are trivial. Sometimes her narrators go from judging a character to empathizing with them in a single story. Of the mother and daughter who are prostitutes in “Xenia’s daughter,” she first has the narrator exclaim:

While here they come often, though God knows why. What on earth is it that brings them? What need have they for this bought love, when all around – in ladlefuls – there’s ordinary love to be had, requiring no payment, just warmth and attention, just a few little words and the presence of someone who’ll accept this waiting, unselfish love and who will give in return, not something costly either, but the simplest of things – a mere nothing, a trifle – and yet in doing so, will celebrate his own need; do what he has to, yet give happiness to.

This was the voice of more fortunate women, like those in Immortal Love who had husbands, though the disloyalty of these other men would seem to belie this happy picture, for when it came to Petrushevskaya’s female dupes, there were those who had fallen into destitution, and those who were perilously close to falling. Lose your husband, lose your apartment: what desperate state could a woman not be reduced to? In an extraordinary passage, the narrator explained how it is that the daughter, despite her mother’s urging for her to get an education, nonetheless sinks into the very same life. What seem like exercises in cruelty, as so often is the case in these stories, transform into acts of profound empathy. As Petrushevskaya put it in a didactic aside:

The task of literature, it seems, is precisely to present, as people worthy of respect and pity, all those who in life are commonly despised. Thus authors adopt a rather lofty position in relation to the rest of the world, taking upon themselves the role of sole defenders of the aforesaid despised, assuming the role of judges, defence, and prosecution rolled into one, and undertaking the hard task of educating the masses and purveying great ideas.

In the second section of Immortal Love, “Monologues,” the view shifted from the third to the first person. No longer are the narrators speaking from the perspective of a prosecutorial or defensive public, but rather the characters themselves are confessing their sins and their follies. Some of the more remarkable of these were “Nets and Snares,” the tale of a pregnant woman who never officially married her husband trying to get the absent father’s mother to take her in, all the while worrying that the mother will think her a fraud and throw her out. “Grisha” was a confession of a different kind, as a girl recalls living out in a dark village barn next to a family, and her guilt about how keeping the lights on may have lead to the titular character being stabbed to death.

Immortal Love, as Abe had read in various places, was greeted as a literary event upon its release in 1988. The Soviet Union was undergoing glasnost, and here, miraculously, were twenty years stored-up of truth-telling stories about the conditions Russian women experienced in the later years under Communism. These stories, as Petrushevskaya explained in an interview with Kirkus Reviews, were inspired by the stories told to her by numerous other women, stories that needed to “be heard, put on record. I wrote in the name of those who suffered. I was a witness for the prosecution. All these years later, people still can’t forgive and forget the pain my fiction had caused.”

Recently it became known to Abe that Petrushevskaya’s memoir The Girl From the Metropole Hotel appeared in English translation just this past February, and reportedly it describes the author’s childhood as part of a family of Stalin-era “Enemies of the State,” as well as periods of homeless wandering by the author. Will this memoir shed light on the time when Petrushevskaya resolved to become a writer, or who influenced her in developing her unique and captivating style? Abe looked forward to finding out.