Books of complaints – Weekend
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Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, the author of countless stories, plays, fairy tales and poems, the great Russian writer, is 85 years old. In Soviet times, not recognized and not published, today it is a living classic – and, as often happens with authors in this status, not fully understood. Petrushevskaya is often considered a chronicler of the leaden horrors of Soviet life, but there is something in her texts that goes beyond the Soviet, as well as beyond the boundaries of horror and everyday life, and to some extent justifies both our life and our literature.
Among the boundless multitude of Petrushevskaya’s texts, there is something like a memoir, stories about herself, collected in the book Stories from My Own Life, and if you try to discern in this collection – and in the author’s biography – a complete plot, it will turn out to be something like Andersen’s fairy tale. Hungry, impoverished childhood, ordeals at odd jobs, domestic disorder, long years of non-recognition and non-printing. But one day, fate, guided by someone’s good hand, will play out the intended game – and everything will be justified, redeemed and compensated. If we count the regalia according to the Wikipedia article, this is exactly what happened: Petrushevskaya was recognized, awarded, transferred; according to the opinion repeatedly expressed, she is the most obvious candidate for the Nobel prize among those who write in Russian. Unconditional national treasure. But somehow not quite.
Perhaps it is knocked down by the status that has taken shape over the years – a little to the side of both the current process and the established hierarchies. In the very nature of her texts there is something that opposes not even canonization, but any completeness, formalization. It’s as if she can’t be read to the end.
The first thing that strikes one who has begun to read Petrushevskaya is her speech, such as they call skazovogo: as if overheard, taken out of the queue, the telephone booth, the communal kitchen. Perhaps it is possible to define this speech even more precisely; in the stories of Petrushevskaya, a remark often appears – they say that this and that happened to the heroine, and at the end of the day she retold all this to her friend on the phone. This is her genre – an evening telephone conversation in which they wash the bones and complain about fate; a stream of not even consciousness, but complaints.
There is always a reason for them. The heroines of Petrushevskaya revolve in the wheel of samsara – in its specifically Soviet modification: cooking, cleaning, washing, quarrels, betrayals, scandals, apartment exchange, caring for small children and frail old people. There is never money, food is never enough. There is some kind of work, no matter what – “running away on duty in the hospital”, “engaged in technical translation”, but it is always unbearably much and at the same time not enough to make ends meet. Men are also present, but such that it would be better if they were not. It cannot be said that everyday life did not penetrate into Soviet literature at all, but Petrushevskaya has only it, this is the only thing that matters: everything important in life takes place in a cramped small apartment, somewhere between the kitchen and the bedroom. And it is spoken about on behalf of its main characters – and at the same time victims doomed to disastrous bogging down in everyday life already by the fact that they were born women.
No matter how wild this comparison may sound, but, in essence, Petrushevskaya does the same thing as Solzhenitsyn in “The Archipelago”: she talks about destinies that otherwise would have sunk without a trace, brings to the surface that side of life that is not customary to talk about, gives voices to all the unjustly tortured, crying out from the depths of the abyss. Tortured – no longer by the Soviet repressive system, but by life itself. Story after story, she marks the map of unfortunate women’s destinies, and it would be unforgivable snobbery to believe that these misfortunes are “what happens to others.” That they are localized in late stagnation, in the lives of the so-called “ordinary people.”
No, this is about any fate that has not fallen rare, one in a million, and always fleeting luck. About any fate in which there is unrequited love, misunderstanding of loved ones, a break with children. Disease, childbirth, aging, death. However, Petrushevskaya is far from simple-hearted sentimentality, her heroines are not innocent victims who were “tortured by the environment”. They themselves have some kind of fracture, a fragment of the mirror of the troll, because of which even the routine of life turns into self-torture and torment of loved ones. Fate, a birth defect, a trauma that is passed down from generation to generation—whatever the cause, it creates a bad manic-depressive infinity: those who suffer from it reproduce it. But even here Petrushevskaya does not blame anyone, does not speak down and, as they say, in the third person. On the contrary, he always does something that breaks through protective armor: do not hide, this is about you, this also applies to you. Something that makes you feel sorry for everyone – and yourself too.
With all the abundance of everyday signs, this life will be reduced to the primary elements, gone into the archaic – this is how it acquires a mythological dimension. Plots are played here as if from ancient books or Indian cinema: seduced and abandoned, separated in childhood and met already grown up, miraculously healed, punished for some secret guilt. People here believe in omens and conspiracies, and the magical in Petrushevskaya’s texts literally permeates the real: her hyperrealistic story is always on the verge of a scary fairy tale, and vice versa.
Reality turns into a dream, a dream into death, the characters move through these worlds – often within a short text – in all directions. “Even though they were under the can, they were somehow friendly, gracious, as if they looked into the afterlife and saw fresh air and plastic flowers there and drank together for this business.” The dead help the living, the living are open to signals from the invisible and incorporeal worlds. These metaphysical drafts are also played out in the language: literary critic Mark Lipovetsky noticed that Petrushevskaya’s flow of speech is often disturbed by some kind of linguistic shift, deliberately bulging irregularity. It’s as if the door has been propped up with a piece of wood or the fabric of the visible world has been torn through – and something like this emanates from there. Not exactly human.
This is a paradox that every reader of Petrushevskaya faces: in her texts everything is extremely material, porridge, saucepans, linen, even if it is a scary tale about a black coat or a withered hand, it is still a familiar domestic horror, like from a pioneer camp ward after lights out. And all the same – behind every diaper or catheter, whim or casual connection, as if unknown superhuman forces are hiding. Or fate, which directs the heroes along pre-drawn trajectories. Or nature, which sets the circular rhythm of love, birth and death. Is it the chthonic energy of this area, which distorts everything reasonable and good with its disastrous radiation. Or, on the contrary, someone’s good hand.
Feeding, cleaning, resentment, quarrels – that life that remains below the radar of art, which art seeks to overcome in the name of something lofty, as in Kabakov’s installation “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room”. But Petrushevskaya has nothing but everyday life and all passages to other worlds are immersed in it, it is monotonous, hopeless, cursed – but somewhere it is consecrated. Through all the momentary signs and mythological structures, no, no, yes, and an ancient, like the world, idyll appears – Philemon and Baucis, old-world landowners – more often as a trace or a reminder, sometimes as a snapshot, a picture that appeared for a moment, and no insidious lovebirds surrounding the heroes and black realtors can’t stop it. The setting for Petrushevskaya’s stories and plays is always the devil knows what, but it’s also paradise; everything lofty – happiness, harmony, God – lives hidden inside these diapers and scandals, there is simply nowhere else for it to fit.
Petrushevskaya has this technique: when the hopeless burden stretches on and on, and ruthless details wind up, and there is no longer anything to breathe from horror – and suddenly, at the very edge, literally in the last phrase, the story takes off sharply upwards, and with this movement, heaviness is removed or unraveled oppressive tangle of circumstances. There is some kind of light, or at least a hint of light. Or, as in the story “My Circle”, through the cycle of drunkenness, divorce, betrayal, unmotivated cruelty, the plan of salvation that the narrator was preparing for her child suddenly appears. As if sympathetic ink appears on the fabric of life or scenery shifts by a millimeter – and the secret meaning of everything becomes visible: that the reverse side of this horror was endless love – and there was nowhere else for it to come true.
And for this movement, truly divine knowledge and mercy are needed – which the reader always lacks, who has not read and understood Petrushevskaya to the end, but which someone’s kind hand has fully endowed the author with.
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