The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Read online

  Acclaim for Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  “Petrushevskaya writes instant classics.”

  —The Daily Beast

  “Petrushevskaya is the Tolstoy of the communal kitchen. . . . She is not, like Tolstoy, writing of war, or, like Dostoyevsky, writing of criminals on the street, or, like poet Anna Akhmatova or novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, noting the extreme suffering of those sent to the camps. Rather, she is bearing witness to the fight to survive the everyday. . . . [She is] dazzlingly talented and deeply empathetic.”

  —Slate

  “This celebrated Russian author is so disquieting that long after Solzhenitsyn had been published in the Soviet Union, her fiction was banned—even though nothing about it screams ‘political’ or ‘dissident’ or anything else. It just screams.”

  —Elle

  “Her suspenseful writing calls to mind the creepiness of Poe and the psychological acuity (and sly irony) of Chekhov.”

  —More

  “Petrushevskaya’s fiction [offers] a glimpse of what it means to be a human being, living sometimes in bitter misery, sometimes in unexpected grace.”

  —Jenny Offill, The New York Times Book Review

  “The fact that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is Russia’s premier writer of fiction today proves that the literary tradition that produced Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Babel is alive and well.”

  —Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast

  “What distinguishes the author is her compression of language, her use of detail and her powerful visual sense.” —Time Out New York

  “A master of the Russian short story.”

  —Olga Grushin, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov

  “There is no other writer who can blend the absurd and the real in such a scary, amazing, and wonderful way.”

  —Lara Vapnyar, author of There Are Jews in My House

  “One of the greatest writers in Russia today and a vital force in contemporary world literature.”

  —Ken Kalfus, author of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

  “A master of the short story form, a kindred spirit to writers like Angela Carter and Yumiko Kurahashi.”

  —Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble, Magic for Beginners, and Stranger Things Happen

  “In her best work Petrushevskaya steers a sure course between neutrally recording the degraded life of the Soviet-era urban underclass and ratcheting up the squalor of that life for the mere pleasure of it. She does so by the steadiness of her moral compass and the gaiety of her prose.”

  —J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

  Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen volumes of prose, including the New York Times bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPR’s Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction; There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories; and There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family. A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia’s most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement.

  Anna Summers is the coeditor and cotranslator of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales as well as the editor and translator of Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories and There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family. Born in Moscow, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Also by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

  There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories

  There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2006 by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  Translation and introduction copyright © 2017 by Anna Summers

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Originally published in Russian by Amfora, St. Petersburg, 2006.

  Image credits: pp. xv, xviii, 46, 86: Wikimedia Commons; p. xvii: still from The Fable of Fables by permission of Soyuzmultfilm Studios; p. 12: photo by Arkady Shaikeht, January 1942, from waralbum.ru; p. 14: photo by Semyon Fridliand, October 1941, from waralbum.ru; pp. 17, 23, 38: photographer unknown, from www.waralbum.ru; p. 27: “Slow spring in Strukovsky Garden,” by Vladimir Kleschev, 2012. Used with permission of the photographer; pp. 68, 98: From pastvu.com; p. 120: Moscow Courtyard by Sergei Vokov, used with permission by the artist.

  All other images courtesy of the author.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Petrushevskaëiìa, Lëiìudmila, author.

  Title: The girl from the Metropol Hotel : growing up in communist Russia /

  Ludmilla Petrushevskaya ; translated with an introduction by Anna Summers.

  Other titles: Malen§kaëiìa devochka iz “Metropolëiìa”. English

  Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2017] | Original Russian

  edition: 2006.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016031256 (print) | LCCN 2016035280 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780143129974 (paperback) | ISBN 9781101993514 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Petrushevskaëiìa, Lëiìudmila—Childhood and youth. |

  Petrushevskaëiìa, Lëiìudmila—Family. | Petrushevskaëiìa,

  Lëiìudmila—Friends and associates. | Authors, Russian—20th

  century—Biography. | Moscow (Russia) —Biography. | Hotel Metropol

  (Moscow, Russia) —History—20th century. | Moscow (Russia) —Social life

  and customs—20th century. | Communism—Social aspects—Soviet

  Union—History. | Coming of age—Soviet Union. | Soviet

  Union—History—1925–1953—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY /

  Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | HISTORY /

  Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union.

  Classification: LCC PG3485.E724 Z4613 2017 (print) | LCC PG3485.E724 (ebook)

  | DDC 891.78/4403 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031256

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Cover design by Nayon Cho

  Cover photograph courtesy of the author

  Version_1

  This transla
tion is dedicated to my father, Arnold Friedrich, another wartime orphan, and to George Scialabba, an author, editor, and friend.

  Contents

  Praise for Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  About the Author

  Also by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's War, by Anna Summers

  The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

  Family Circumstances. The Vegers

  The War

  Kuibyshev

  Kuibyshev. Survival Strategies

  How I Was Rescued

  The Durov Theatre

  Searching for Food

  Dolls

  Victory Night

  The Officers' Club

  The Courtiers' Language

  The Bolshoi Theatre

  Down the Ladder

  Literary Sleep-Ins

  My Performances. Green Sweater

  The Portrait

  The Story of a Little Sailor

  My New Life

  The Metropol Hotel

  Mumsy

  Summer Camp

  Chekhov Street. Grandpa Kolya

  Trying to Fit In

  Children's Home

  I Want to Live!

  Snowdrop

  The Wild Berries

  Gorilla

  Dying Swan

  Sanych

  Foundling

  Introduction

  Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's War

  Every year on May 9, old men all over Russia—in every village and town, no matter how small or squalid—don their best suits, attach medals to their lapels, and shuffle outside to participate in street “parades.” The old men, generally neglected by a state uninterested in its citizens, especially in the decrepit among them, have this one day on which they are honored and extolled.

  That’s how it used to be. In 2015, on the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II, no rows of veterans paraded through city or village streets. Instead, for the first time, portraits of the veterans were carried by their grandchildren, who marched to the same war-themed music that has filled Russian airwaves every May for decades. The veterans, frail and stooped, in their old-fashioned berets and oversize Sunday suits sporting rows of medals, are dead—save for a bare handful. So are their wives and the more numerous war widows. That incredible generation is gone, and the war that was part of Russia’s consciousness every day for seventy-five years has finally receded. The veterans’ great-grandchildren, today’s teenagers, are the first generation for whom the Great Patriotic War isn’t living reality but just another historical fact.

  The war hasn’t disappeared entirely, though. Before today’s teens came two other generations, for whom the war remains a living memory: the veterans’ children, like Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, who are now in their seventies, and their grandchildren, who are now in their thirties and forties. The younger of these, like me, born thirty years after the war, are connected to it by our direct link with the veterans, the old men and women who shared our little apartments and homes, raised us, cared for us, were our beloved dedushkas and babushkas. Every family in every part of the enormous country, without exception, shared wartime experiences through their grandparents. Those experiences were a commonplace subject as early as kindergarten, where the first question between toddlers was, “What did your grandpa do in the war?” A proud or mournful answer followed, facts were exchanged, ice broken.

  Except sometimes the facts of a family’s connection with the war weren’t suited for proud retelling and were therefore often concealed from the little ones, who would then be forced to hem and haw and finally come up with some lie. Sometimes our grandparents didn’t just die gruesomely, burning alive in a tank, like mine, or return disfigured, or even return at all. Sometimes they were arrested and sent to the Gulag, like Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich and Solzhenitsyn himself, for some imaginary wrongdoing at the front, or, even more inconveniently, arrested en masse and executed before the war had even begun, like Petrushevskaya’s. In a scene in the memoir, Petrushevskaya is mortified when other wartime toddlers boast about their fathers and uncles fighting at the front and she can’t come up with a single name. Thirty years later, I would be mortified, too.

  • • •

  The arrest and execution of Petrushevskaya’s relatives—prominent Bolsheviks elevated by the October Revolution—in the late thirties ensured, among other things, that her war would be different from the war of her peers. The shared experiences of their childhoods—evacuation, hunger—were heightened in her case to an unbearable—and unshareable—extreme because of the social stigma that branded her an “enemy of the people.” That was the official status of Petrushevskaya’s remaining family throughout her childhood. And, she points out wryly, it was no joke. At a time when everyone was cold, dirty, and hungry, she and her aunt and grandmother, who until recently had resided in great comfort at the Metropol Hotel, were hungrier, dirtier, and colder than everyone else. They were banned from the shared bathroom in their communal apartment; in the endless food lines, they were always the last to be served; police wouldn’t protect them when neighbors attacked them, even with an ax; and they were open prey to any thug—and this in a town full of bandits. Most important, those men at the front weren’t fighting for them. They were everyone’s enemies, from the soldier at the front to the janitor in their apartment building. The Great War that temporarily equalized Russia’s population, turning it into a brotherhood and sisterhood of suffering, extended no welcoming hand to little Petrushevskaya and her wretched aunt and grandmother. Though they were eventually all rehabilitated, during the war they were interned like Japanese Americans during the same period, except their camp had invisible walls and they were the only ones in it.

  All this makes Petrushevskaya’s memoir unique, and potentially gruesome. Yet there is nothing gruesome about it. From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. The child in her book, like all children, has been endowed with gifts from two fairies, an evil one and a kind one. The evil fairy, a definite heavyweight, took away the child’s home, her mother, her father, her clothes, her toys, her food, and her civil rights, leaving her without shoes in wintertime. The kind fairy, doing what she could, gave the child excellent health, mental resilience, a hunger for beauty and culture, an unerring ethical compass, and an array of talents. A faithfully observed balance between deprivation and fullness, physical scarcity and inner abundance, social scorn and artistic triumph, lifts Petrushevskaya’s account above self-pity and places it alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Édith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. Petrushevskaya’s girl is right up there, dancing a gypsy dance at an orphanage, singing her heart out in the school choir despite having nowhere to live, reading herself blind at the public library after school, ignoring hunger cramps, and, much later in life, writing her incomparable prose “into the desk,” unpublishable and unpublished. The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.

  • • •

  The Metropol Hotel today.

  The Metropol Hotel is a vast art deco building in downtown Moscow, steps away from Red Square, where the country’s main Victory Day parades take place. Today it is once again a world-class luxury hotel. The lobby and the bar are empty in the daytime. The only visitors are listless women in miniskirts and sheer pantyhose, with peroxide hair and provincial faces. They are today’s “girls from the Metropol,” as prostitutes are sometimes called in everyday Muscovite slang. “Why are you dressed like a girl from the Metropol?” a shocked mom may ask her daughter. Petrushevskaya and her young mother were also called �
��girls from the Metropol,” but with a very different meaning. After the October Revolution the famed building was designated the Second House of Soviets. For many years it housed the Party government and prominent revolutionaries, like the author’s great-grandfather. To reside in that building was like having a mailing address at Buckingham Palace. Hence the double meaning of Petrushevskaya’s title. From a Bolshevik princess, the girl from the Metropol descended to Moscow’s nether regions occupied by prostitutes, beggars, and the homeless. She left the Metropol a pampered toddler and returned there at the age of nine, a wild, lice-ridden, emaciated Mowgli. Naturally she and her poor mother weren’t allowed to stay in that exalted, orderly establishment. Their wanderings and social alienation continued.

  Still from The Fable of Fables (1979), directed by Yuri Norstein, art by Franchesca Yarbusova.

  What would have happened if she had stayed? If, miraculously, she had found refuge in the building that symbolized the new regime and housed the new elite? If on May 9, the girl had proudly crossed Revolution Square in front of the Metropol and joined the Victory Day parade, watching the men in medals with different eyes, as someone for whom they had officially fought and shed blood? If she had never known such scorn, such helplessness, such hunger and cold, never run barefoot or sung on street corners for food? Then we would have no Petrushevskaya—and we, selfishly, would regret it. The art that shines so brightly in this little book was born not in a palatial hotel among Party bosses but on Kuibyshev’s dirty streets, in view of the majestic Volga River, and under Petrushevskaya’s grandfather’s dinner table, where she and her mother found shelter of sorts when they were turned away from the Metropol. And now, every year on May 9, Russian state television shows an animated film, The Fable of Fables (also translated as Tale of Tales) (Skazka skazok), written by Petrushevskaya. A national and international sensation when it came out in 1979, the film tells the story of a little wolf cub, abandoned in wartime, who is a reincarnation of the memoir’s street urchin, the little girl who survived the war.