Petrushevskya: The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

 The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

3 November, 2022, The Berkeley Times, "Knox Book Beat," as "Body Politic Survival."

If you think living under four years of an angry, vicious, ignorant, autocratic, propagandist, anti-intellectual, ego-maniacal, military-adventurist, intolerant, sectarian-dominated national government "won't be too bad;" you need to read this book. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (also spelled Lyudmila Petrushevskaya) really had a terrifying fall in Stalin’s Soviet Union when her family of academics became “relatives of arrested enemies of the people,” (Bolsheviks, non-ruling Party members) and she, an Aunt and Granny fled to Samara (Kuibyshev) by train “the beginning of the terrible winter of 1941,” when she was only 3 ½. 

        Under totalitarianism, “Grandpa was fired because he wasn’t quick enough to praise Stalin’s article ‘Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics,’” three of his children were “disappeared” because they belonged to the wrong political party, and her father distanced them all. Sound familiar? Presidential staff members in one week, out the next when they aren't quick enough to affirm and applaud?
        “Aunt Vava took home potato peels from the compost heap outside the Officer’s Club… We also looked for food in our neighbors’ garbage,” she couldn’t go to school because she had no shoes, she sang and begged in the streets, “led the life of pariahs, untouchables,” and when they returned to her mother and family in Moscow after the Nazi surrender, even though her Granny had recited many Russian classics of literature to her every night and she could read and write, she “had become an unmanageable, wild child, a real Mowgli.”
        Details of this portion of her life are both astonishing and harrowing, not a little because several millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks and others were perishing of starvation, massacres, administrative “bungling” and outright genocide during the same period, while she was slipping under the tent to see the elephant in the circus, Bolshoi Theater, constantly got demoted for bad behavior while also dodging bullies and rapists. "Resilience and ingenuity thread through the hardship," Ingrid Norton says in her article in Dissent magazine, "Truth through Fairy Tale," and that is the clue to her charm. She's a storyteller par excellence, and says "Russia is a land of women...who tell their stories orally...I'm just a listener among them."

        And a very good oral historian herself! She faked her way into a graduate internship in journalism by claiming to be following Comrade Khrushchev’s call to “proletarian work for the benefit of common peasants, workers,” because she knew it was "the Party line."
        When offered a radio interview and spot after tagging along to cover “the student brigades” in Kazakhstan, “and very soon sat in a warm, bright studio in front of the microphone, recapping my newsletter…sang…a huge novelty,” that connected her to “the head of the arts and culture section” when she returned to Moscow. What a character! 

She SURVIVED.
        “Never have I been frightened by circumstances,” she says, “A little warmth, a little bread, my little ones with me, and life begins, happiness begins.”
         May we all be so resilient, so resourceful, and attentive to any opportunity! And LUCKY. We may need it. Fortuna, smile upon us! 

Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, (22 February, 2023) "Lyudmila Petrushevskaya," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Petrushevskaya (4 April, 2023)

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