SCIENTIFIC NOTES OF KAZAN STATE UNIVERSITY Volume 150, book. 6 Humanities 2008

UDC 82.0:801.6

ON "SENTIMENTAL NATURALISM"

IN L. PETRUSHEVSKAYA'S PROSE

T. G. Prokhorova Abstract

The article examines the relationship between naturalistic and sentimentalist discourses in L. Petrushevskaya's prose. The main material of the analysis is the story "Time is night". The reasons for the emergence and manifestation of the so-called "sentimental naturalism" in the prose of the writer are clarified.

Key words: naturalistic discourse, sentimentalist discourse, tragedy, parody.

When critics or readers talk about the work of L. Petrushevskaya, they usually say that in her field of vision there is mainly a “sick”, flawed world, for the image of which naturalism techniques are used. But in Petrushevskaya's prose and plays, naturalistic discourse, as a rule, is closely intertwined with sentimentalist discourse. The writer has repeatedly argued that one of the important impulses that encourage her to work is pity. Already about her early stories, L. Petrushevskaya said that she was "insanely sorry for her heroes," and added: "Most often I wrote out of pity." But then the question arises: why in her works do we so often encounter, simultaneously with sensitivity, with tears of pity, pathological cruelty, rough physiology of images?

It must be said that the very problem of the relationship between sentimentalism and naturalism is by no means new. The term "sentimental naturalism" belongs to the nineteenth century critic Apollon Grigoriev. Speaking about the originality of Gogol's work, he noted the duality of the position of the writer, who "looked at reality with the eye of an analyst ... and, finishing his picture, was forced to exclaim:" It's boring in this world, gentlemen. From that moment on, he already took an anatomical knife in his hands, from that moment, “invisible tears through the laughter visible to the world” flowed copiously. But first of all, the critic used the term "sentimental naturalism" in relation to early work F.M. Dostoevsky. The idea of ​​A. Grigoriev was developed in the 20th century. So, V.V. Vinogradov in his works of the 1920s wrote about the “school of sentimental naturalism”, the leader of which he called F.M. Dostoevsky. Ideas V.V. Vinogradov was developed by M.M. Bakhtin. In the notes "Problems of Sentimentalism", the scientist argued that the "natural school" arose as "a kind of Russian sentimentalism". However, the interest of M.M. Bakhtin to sentimentalism and its mutual

action with naturalism was associated not only with the natural school, and even not only with the work of Dostoevsky, but also with the problem of carnival, with the theme of “the inner man and intimate connections between inner people". These problems are relevant to modern literature as well.

M. Epstein, giving a forecast of the development of our literature in the 21st century, argued: “The sensitivity of the 21st century will not be a direct repetition of the sensitivity of the 18th century. She will not divide the world into touching and terrible, sweet and disgusting. It will absorb a lot of counter-feelings.

N. Leiderman and M. Lipovetsky traced how “neo-sentimentalism” is formed in contemporary literature. They drew attention to the fact that in the 1990s "there is an important transformation of chernukha": "corporality provides the ground for a neo-sentimentalist current." Moreover, according to scientists, this is especially evident in "women's prose". Rediscovering "" little man”, this literature surrounds him with compassion and pity, but the hero of sentimental naturalism himself is not yet ready for self-consciousness, he is completely closed in the emotional-physiological sphere. Although in the field of view of N. Leiderman and M. Lipovetsky there are enough wide circle authors, for some reason the name of L. Petrushevskaya fell out of it, which should have taken a central place in this series and helped to correct the idea of ​​the so-called sentimental naturalism.

Researcher of modern prose T.N. Markova rightly noted that for L. Petrushevskaya "paradoxicality ... is the most natural and organic form of perception and image" . This observation is consonant with the opinions of many other critics (L. Pann, O. Darka, E. Goshchilo), who point to the writer's ability to simultaneously see purity and dirt, pain and pleasure, life and death. It is in this oxymoronic variant that the interaction of naturalistic and sentimentalist discourses takes place in Petrushevskaya's prose.

Let's demonstrate this with a specific example. Let us turn to one of her most famous works - the story "Time is Night", which actually contains the main motives of L. Petrushevskaya's work. It was published at the very beginning of the 1990s, and then many were shocked by the image of "a wretched life condensed to a swirling darkness."

The story "Time is Night" is written in the form of "notes on the edge of the table", which belong to the main character. Recall that naturalism is characterized by documentary and factographic, the desire to fix the "naturalness" of the language. In the prologue to the story "Time is Night" it is reported how the author received these "notes".

Excuse the trouble, but here after mom, - she paused, - after mom, there were manuscripts. I thought you might read it. She was a poet. Of course, I understand you are busy. A lot of work? Understand. Well then, excuse me.

Two weeks later, a manuscript arrived in an envelope, a dusty folder with a lot of scribbled sheets, school notebooks, even telegram forms. Subtitled Notes on the edge of the table. No return address, no last name.

Thus, in the story "The Time is Night" the illusion is created that the author acts only as a publisher. True, with the outward naturalness, seeming spontaneity of the notes, the composition of the story is quite complex: the mother’s notes include her daughter’s diary, and it, in turn, includes a conversation-quarrel between mother and grandmother recorded by the daughter; finally, in addition to the daughter’s diary, the mother’s notes also include "as if" a diary is a text written by a mother on behalf of her daughter.

The connection with naturalism in the story “Time is Night” is indicated by the words-signals that appear literally on the first pages: firstly, the name of Charles Darwin is mentioned twice. At its inception, naturalism was ideologically associated with the works of a number of scientists, including Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In the story of L. Petrushevskaya, the name of the scientist signals the significance in this work themes of the struggle for survival. True, it is implemented here primarily at the household level. At the beginning of her "notes", the main character Anna Andrianovna says that she often has to visit with her beloved grandson Tima without an invitation. For her, this is a way to feed Timochka, whom she calls the "child of hunger." Anna Andrianovna first compared the son-in-law of her old friend Masha with Charles Darwin: “A good man's face, something from Charles Darwin, but not at this moment. Something vile is manifested in him, something despicable. Such a disapproving characterization is due to the fact that he "had something against Tima", and his own son Dima "was tired of him like a dog", since every evening he demanded to switch the TV to the program " Goodnight, kids, ”and on this occasion they had a fight with their father.” Immediately, Anna Andrianovna, by association, recalls a different story, when she and her grandson came to “very distant acquaintances” to find out about her daughter Alena, and, as soon as they were seated at the table and poured borscht, “a shepherd bitch swept out from under the bed and bites Tim on the elbow. Tima yells wildly with a mouth full of meat ... The father of the family, who also vaguely resembles Charles Darwin, falls out from behind the table screaming and threatening, of course, pretending to be against a dog. After that, Anna Andrianovna concludes: "That's it, there is no more way for us here."

These episodes can be quite interpreted in the spirit of Darwin's theory of "natural selection", and in both cases the feminine, more precisely, maternal view of things is clearly expressed. The existence of the heroine is an ongoing battle for survival, for the salvation of children. Men, on the other hand, act as opponents in this struggle, therefore the name of Charles Darwin in this context is perceived as a sign of hostility, danger.

In addition to Darwin, there are other word-signals in the story that keep the memory of naturalism. First of all, these are two images: “trap” and “hunger”. The first of them addresses the reader to E. Zola as the author of the novel "The Trap" and one of the theorists of French naturalism. With the help of this image in the story "Time is Night" the following characterization of the cruel law of existence is given:

“Everything hung in the air like a sword, our whole life, ready to collapse. The trap slammed shut, as it slams behind us every day, but sometimes

a log fell from above, and in the ensuing silence, everyone crawled away, crushed ... ".

The second key word - "hunger" - is also reminiscent and brings to mind the name of the famous novel by K. Hamsun "Hunger" - about a novice writer full of hardships, whose pangs of hunger, aggravated by pangs of pride, led to the brink of insanity. Note that the heroine of the story "Time is Night" also considers herself a writer and she is also a person with offended pride. "We are not beggars!" she proudly declares. In addition, in the work of L. Petrushevskaya, like in Hamsun, the theme of madness is very significant. But it is connected with the motive of hunger in a completely different way: if Hamsun has a real hunger, then in the story “Time is night” it is rather far-fetched. As it turns out later, Anna Andrianovna has a considerable amount of money on her savings book, so she and her grandson do not have to starve in the literal sense. Nevertheless, the motive of hunger in the story sounds very insistent, since it is associated with the manifestation of a peculiar mania of the heroine.

There are also references to the Russian "natural school", in particular to Gogol. Suffice it to recall the famous quote "It's boring to live in this world, gentlemen," which sounds in the diary of Anna Andrianovna's daughter. These words in the context of Petrushevskaya's work are perceived as a sentence to the world in which her characters are forced to exist.

Although in the “notes on the edge of the table” the “family thought” is expressed first of all, we are talking about the relationship of the heroine with her children, grandchildren and with her own mother, but these relationships are of a painfully neurotic nature. The heroes themselves call the life they lead bestial. So, Alena, the daughter of Anna Andrianovna, introducing her brother, who had just returned from prison, to the course of household affairs, says: “You know this is our eternal bestiality.” Indeed, it is found in everything and manifests itself even in the most quivering, poetic moments of life. For example, Anna Andrianovna presents in her notes the scene of the meeting of Alena from the maternity hospital after the birth of her first-born Tima:

“So I brought my trinity to the figuratively stuffed taxi seat. What was there, water and water. The scoundrel (Anna Andrianovna calls her son-in-law that. - T.P.) was carrying the child on outstretched arms.<...>A fly buzzed in the taxi, attracted, apparently, by a wet rag, bloody deeds, what can I say, the fly was apparently also on demolition in spring time. All these are our dirty deeds, dirt, sweat, flies right there. .

At the same time, Anna Andrianovna, quite in the spirit of naturalism, interprets all the facts related to physiology, bodily needs as an inexorable law of nature:

"O deceiver nature! Oh great! For some reason, she needs this suffering, this horror, blood, stench, sweat, mucus, convulsions, love, violence, pain, sleepless nights, hard work, everything seems to be fine! But no, and everything is bad again. .

But it is characteristic that, along with the motive of "dirt", the motive of cleanliness, or rather hygiene, persistently sounds in the story. Anna Andrianovna endlessly, by the way and inopportunely, convinces her adult children of the need to wash their hands, take

showers, which invariably irritates them. It seems that these calls to wash more often express the subconscious desire of the heroine to cleanse herself, to free herself from the dirt that has penetrated the life of each member of this family. As if you just need to wash yourself once again, and all the terrible things will go away. Here, for example, is what Anna Andrianovna inspires her daughter, who by this time lives “in settlements with her fattening daughter from an imaginary roommate”, is going to give birth to a third child and also tells her mother that she has very low hemoglobin, her kidneys are failing, her urine protein, in connection with which she is put in the hospital, and there is no one to leave the baby with: “I taught you how many times that hygiene must be observed every day. Poorly washed, that's all the protein.<...>Don't talk nonsense. What hospital, you're with a small child. What could be a hospital? First, descend or go wash up at last and hand over the analysis as follows.

During a conversation with Alena, Anna Andrianovna wants only one thing - that everything terrible that happens to her is suddenly resolved in the simplest and most primitive way or simply disappears. In this regard, it is characteristic what advice she gives to her daughter: “Hide from them, and no one will force them. It's OK" .

She herself is also trying to hide, but at the same time, Anna Andrianovna retains the ability to analyze what is happening and clearly imagines its possible consequences. So, after the conversation with her daughter is over, she gives him a completely sober assessment: “After all, our conversation was not about protein and not about urine, our conversation was like this: Mom, help, take on another burden. Mom, you always helped me out, help me out. - But daughter, I am not able to love another creature, this is a betrayal of the baby, he already looked at the new sister like a little animal. - Mom, what to do? “Nothing, I can’t help you, I gave you everything.” .

Researchers note that in "classical" naturalism, character, as a social category, is reduced, reduced to temperament, a hereditary factor. By "temperament" is meant precisely the inherited mental make-up, closely connected with physiology, with the life of the body. As a result, heredity becomes a materialistic substitute for fate.

In the story "The Time is Night" it is this sign of naturalism that is actualized, which largely determines the circle of life that the characters go through. Critics immediately drew attention to the fact that the fate of Sima's grandmother, mother (Anna Andrianovna) and daughter (Alena) is repeated down to the smallest detail. Numerous romance novels each of them invariably ends badly: they give birth to children out of wedlock, their husbands leave them, and as a result they remain lonely and deeply unhappy. At the same time, women themselves do not realize that each of them repeats the life path of her mother.

And yet the feeling that unites mother and daughter is love-hate, and it requires not one "language" for expression, but two at once. That is why, along with naturalistic discourse, sentimentalist discourse is so important in Petrushevskaya's prose.

Anna Andrianovna from the story "The Time of Night" is characterized by exalted sensitivity, which, naturally, is reflected in her manner of perceiving oc-

scathing, explain. It is not surprising that the words "crying", "tears" are among the most frequent here. Often on one page, and sometimes in one sentence, they occur several times. And everyone is crying: men, women, children. The only difference lies in the fact for what reason and how the heroes cry: “Tima yells wildly”, “Timochka howled in a thin voice, like a kitten”, “I started crying again in a fever”, “I quietly wiped my tears”, “a storm with tears Alena "," now these tears will roll down, poor tears "," flavored with bitter tears "," he cried on his knees "," he is ashamed of his tears "etc. etc.

Anna Andrianovna's speech is replete with emotional outbursts, contrasting combinations of horror and delight. In the text, this is manifested in the abundance of exclamatory sentences, rhetorical questions - in a word, in various means that contribute to the achievement of the effect of melodrama, pathos of speech.

Here is how, for example, Anna Andrianovna says about herself: “And again I saved the child! I save everyone all the time! I’m the only one in the whole city in our neighborhood listening at night to see if anyone screams!” . Or: “A woman is weak and indecisive when it comes to her personally, but she is a beast when it comes to children!” . Or another example: “I loved her madly! Madly in love with Andryusha! Endlessly!" .

In the speech of the heroine, in which the sentimental-pathetic element is clearly expressed, classical sentimentalist clichés are often beaten up. It is known that sentimentalism is characterized by: compassion for the unfortunate, the exaltation of the images of the mother and child, the glorification of a modest life in the family circle, the installation on the image of the little things in life. In the "notes" of Anna Andrianovna we can meet all this, but, of course, in a specific deformed form.

Looking at her adult children, Anna Andrianovna often recalls what kind of children they were and how they loved their mother: “My beauty, whom I admired in diapers, each finger of which I washed and kissed. I was touched by her curls (what had gone), her huge, clear, bright, like forget-me-not eyes, which radiated goodness, innocence, affection - everything for me. Oh their childhood! My bliss, my love for these two chicks." .

Since Anna Andrianovna considers herself a poet, she expresses in verse the feeling of maternal tenderness that she experienced when looking at her sleeping children: “The white flame of hair shines on a white pillow, The nose breathes, The eyes and ears are hidden.”

Even when the children became adults, when the relationship between them and their mother reached the limit of hostility, misunderstanding, Anna Andrianovna did not stop loving them. “Love, love and once again love and pity for him guided me when he left the colony,” she says about her feelings for her son.

With a vengeance, this love is manifested in relation to her grandson, whom Anna Andrianovna simply adores. For her, he is a “holy baby”, an “angel”, the meaning of her life. When the children moved away from Anna Andrianovna, quiet family happiness became possible only next to him. For example, how the heroine in

in his “notes on the edge of the table” presents a family idyll - celebrating the New Year together with his grandson: “And on New Year we hung our spruce bouquet from top to bottom ... And for a short time I lit a garland, and our house sparkled, and Tima and I danced a round dance. and I silently wiped away my tears.

Sentimentalists considered beautiful, poetic moments of life to be the subject of art. They drew attention to the need to depict not what is, but what should be, "to create a world of poetic dreams." Anna Andrianovna, as if following this law, recalls those brief moments when they were with Beloved together and nothing could disturb the quiet joy of this holiday, even the fact that Alena took the box with Christmas tree decorations the day before.

It is known that sentimentalists saw the purpose of art in the moral ennoblement of man. They believed that it should not shy away from an instructive tone, the writer should show how a person should behave, what moral standards he should be guided by. He teaches to see true happiness in honest work, in harmony with oneself, in a modest life in the family circle. We can assume that this attitude of sentimentalism was embodied in a parody-game form in Anna Andrianovna's "notes". True, “moral ennoblement” is expressed in her mainly in the form of reproaches against her daughter and son, but the goal that she sets in this case is to set the right path. For example, on New Year's Eve, Anna Andrianovna prepared a pamphlet "Rules of good manners" as a gift for her son who returned from prison. Having previously worked "on this text", she "boldly emphasized some provisions, the so-called behavior in everyday life." The heroine teaches not only her children, but even strangers. So, she very emotionally inspired one passenger in the tram that he had no right to kiss his little daughter on the lips, because such actions are depraved and form pathological inclinations in the child. Anna Andrianovna defines her task in the following pompous declaration: “To bring enlightenment, legal enlightenment into this dark thicket, into this crowd!” .

Sentimentalistic and naturalistic discourses in Petrushevskaya not only coexist, but interact with each other, forming a complex, contradictory unity. Just as two opposite feelings - love and hatred - are present in one being, two discourses - sentimentalist and naturalistic - are also contrastingly conjugated. Here the heroine declares her love to her Beloved, grandson Tima: “I carnally love him, passionately. It is a pleasure to hold his thin, weightless hand in your hand, to see his blue eyes with such eyelashes that the shadow from them, as my favorite writer wrote, lies on the cheeks - and anywhere, I will add. O fans! Parents in general, and grandparents in particular, love little children with a carnal love that replaces everything for them.<...>That's how nature intended to love. It is released to love, and love has spread its wings over those who are not supposed to, over the old people. Warm up!” .

In the above fragment, it is especially noticeable how the sentimentalist discourse, reflecting the "poetic moments of the beautiful", contains the naturalistic theme of the call of the flesh, the dictates of nature, and in this case we are talking about something that lies outside the norm - about carnal love.

grandmother to grandson. There are a great many such examples, when a seemingly unconnectable connection occurs, at Petrushevskaya.

Let us now try to give an answer to the question that was raised at the beginning of the article: why is it possible to combine base and tenderly sensitive, pathetic and carnally rude?

First, let us once again recall M. Epstein's statement about the nature of sensitivity in neo-sentimentalism of the 21st century: “It will not divide the world into touching and terrible, sweet and disgusting. It will absorb a lot of counter-feelings. In this case, in Petrushevskaya, we observe just such a combination of "counter-feelings". The experience of postmodernism with its equal acceptance of many truths and the compatibility of all "languages" has taught us not to be surprised by this.

The second answer is related to the psychological phenomenon of love-hate, which we usually meet with Petrushevskaya. An explanation for this phenomenon can be found in Z. Freud. In the work “Psychology of the masses and the analysis of the human “I””, he writes that “every intimate emotional connection between two persons, which has a longer or shorter duration (marriage, friendship, parental or childish feelings), leaves a residue of opposing hostile feelings, abolished only by displacement". Freud explains the ambivalence inherent in an intimate emotional connection through the phenomenon of identification, which is known in psychoanalysis “as the most early manifestation emotional attachment to another person. "Identification is ambivalent from the very beginning, it can be an expression of tenderness, as well as a desire to eliminate the father" or mother - in a word, someone whom we consider a rival. Illustrating this idea, Z. Freud gives an analogy with a cannibal who devours both his enemies and those he loves.

We also encounter such a psychological phenomenon in the works of Petrushevskaya, including the story “Time is Night”. Here again it is appropriate to recall that the fate of its heroes is actually repeated from generation to generation. Consequently, unconsciously identifying herself with her mother, each of the heroines experiences a dual feeling: hostility and love, affection and the desire to “devour” a loved one. Each of them sees in the other both an enemy and an object of love. This tendency manifests itself in many of Petrushevskaya's works. In the story “Time is Night”, the following confessions of Anna Andrianovna about the relationship that she, then a married woman, had with her own mother are indicative: “. my mother herself wanted to be the object of her daughter's love, that is, me, so that I only loved her, the object of love and trust, this mother wanted to be the whole family for me.<...>My mother, until everything terrible happened, that is how she survived from the house of my unfortunate husband. .

Anna Andrianovna herself exactly repeats the model of her mother's behavior, but does not notice this. She also wanted to be the only object of love for her children and grandson. The following maxim is characteristic, in which Anna Andrianovna mentally addresses her daughter, inspiring her to free herself from her husband: “Have mercy, my girl, drive him in three necks, we ourselves! I will meet you in everything, why do we need him? Why??" .

As a result, Anna Andrianovna still manages to survive from her son-in-law's apartment, she did everything possible so that he left her daughter. It is indicative in this connection that the sentimentalist discourse manifests itself mainly in those statements of the heroine when she represents children as her property. So, for example, Anna Andrianovna looks at her adult daughter and sees in her the child she once was: “I was touched by her curls (where everything went), her huge, clear, bright, like forget-me-nots, eyes that radiated good , innocence, affection - everything for me.

This "everything for me" explains the nature of the relationship between mother and children. In this regard, it is interesting how important the theme of the night acquires: “At nights, only at nights, I experienced the happiness of motherhood. Cover it, tuck it in, get on your knees. They didn't need my love. Or rather, without me, they would have died, but at the same time, I personally interfered with them.

Thus, the “night” for Anna Andrianovna is an opportunity to be alone with the children and experience the happiness of motherhood, because at night the children cannot leave her “circle”, they belong to her. But, as soon as the children violate the border of the mother's space, going beyond its limits, they immediately become strangers, respectively, hostility towards them arises. In her daughter - the mother of three children - Anna Andrianovna sees a "busty noisy aunt", a "female", some kind of "low woman" encroaching on her territory. Therefore, she slams the door in front of Alena, does not want to let her into the apartment, exclaiming at the same time: “We don’t have money to accept you here! There is not!!!" . Anna Andrianovna is afraid that her daughter will take Tima away from her, which she still believes belongs to her.

The heroes cannot establish the psychological distance necessary for a normal existence, and the situation escalates to the limit. They argue furiously over square meters, brother and sister are jealous of each other, quarrel for any reason both among themselves and with their mother. Even if the heroes leave the walls of their home for a while, they find themselves in an atmosphere of even greater crowding, crowding, and, consequently, hostility and cruelty. None of them can find their own private space. And yet, striving for this, they fence themselves off from each other, lock themselves in their rooms, hang locks on the doors, and at the same time their souls are tightly locked. In the end, Anna Andrianovna is left completely alone, all her relatives leave her. But she is again unable to be alone, because she is used to existing for others, so the only thing left for her is to die.

So, the reason for the tragedy that is usually played out in the works of Petrushevskaya can be explained as follows: the characters exist in the space of “their own circle”, but as a result of their alienation from each other, a distance arises that they try to overcome in two ways: either according to the “cannibalistic” scenario , that is, trying to jealously appropriate those they love, or building a new wall and thus aggravating hostility. To express these two psychological models of Petrushevskaya, two different speech strategies were needed: a combination of naturalistic and sentimentalist discourses.

T.G. Prokhorova. On “Sentimental Naturalism” in the Works of L. Petrushevskaya.

The article deals with the combination of naturalistic and sentimental discourses in the prose of L. Petrushevskaya. The essay is based on the novel “The Time is Night”. The author addresses the reasons and the forms in which sentimental naturalism demonstrates itself.

Key words: naturalistic discourse, sentimentalist discourse, tragedy, parody.

Literature

1. Petrushevskaya L. Little girl from the Metropol. - St. Petersburg: Amphora Publishing House, TID Amphora, 2006. - 464 p.

2. Grigoriev A.A. Works in two volumes. T. 2. - M .: Khudozh. lit., 1990. - 227p.

3. Bakhtin M.M. The problem of sentimentalism // Bakhtin M.M. Sobr. op. in 7 volumes - M .: Rus. dictionaries, 1997. - V. 5. - S. 304-305.

4. Epstein M.N. Postmodern in Russian literature. - M.: Higher. school, 2005. - 495 p.

5. Leiderman N.L., Lipovetsky M.N. Modern Russian literature: in 3 books. Book. 3: At the end of the century (1986-1900s). - M.: Editorial URSS, 2001. - 160 p.

6. Markova T.N. Modern prose: construction and meaning (V. Makanin, L. Petrushevskaya, V. Pelevin). - M.: MGOU, 2003. - 268 p.

7. Petrushevskaya L. House of girls: stories and novels. - M.: Vagrius, 1998. - 448 p.

8. Milovidov V.A. Naturalism: method, poetics, style. - Tver, Tversk. state un-t, 1993. -72 p.

9. Freud Z. Psychology of the masses and analysis of the human "I" // Criminal mob. - M.: Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1999. - S. 119-194.

Received 24.12.07

Prokhorova Tatyana Gennadievna - Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of Russian Literature, Kazan State University.

Email: [email protected]

Essay text:

When I got acquainted with the prose of cruel realism by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, I was especially strongly emotionally impressed by the story Time to Night, in which, in my opinion, this tradition of modern literature is traced very consistently.
The work has a frame composition and opens with a brief preface, from which we learn the history of the appearance of the main text of the story. The author reportedly received a phone call from a woman asking to read her mother's manuscript. So the diary of the poetess Anna Andrianovna appears before us, revealing the tragedy of the life of a large family.
In the story Time to Night, we find almost all the main themes and motifs that sound in the work of L. Petrushevskaya: loneliness, madness, illness, suffering, old age, death.
At the same time, the technique of hyperbolization is used: the extreme degree of human suffering is depicted, the horrors of life appear in a concentrated form, a lot of naturalistically repulsive details appear. Thus, we get the impression of complete immersion in the insoluble everyday problems of the heroes of the story.
It is the lyricist Time Night, from my point of view, that can be considered one of the most striking examples of shock prose, as many critics define the work of L. Petrushevskaya.

What is the world of the characters in the story? This is a vicious circle of difficult life circumstances: a cramped apartment in which three generations of people live, an unsettled life, social insecurity, the impossibility of obtaining reliable information.
Petrushevskaya shows the living conditions and situations in which the existence of the characters is closed, and draws signs of such situations in a peculiar way: from empty plates, darned linen, half a loaf of black and pollock soup to abortions, divorces, abandoned children, crazy old women.
At the same time, it can be noted that the text of Anna Andrianovna’s manuscript is extremely physiological, it widely uses colloquial speech (grab, fumble, poke, snoop, go crazy, snatch, etc.) and even swear words (dialogues between the poetess and her daughter, Andrey’s remarks) .
It seemed to me that in the world of the heroes of the story there is no idea of ​​real time. Here, I think, one of the meanings of the title of this work arises: at night, time is not felt, it seems to freeze. I do not feel the time and Anna Andrianovna, and Alena, and Andrey, who live in momentary problems, everyday routine.
On the other hand, the night is a time of intense spiritual life, occupied with reflections, memories, introspection. At night, poems are written, diaries are kept, as the narrator does: at night you can be left alone with paper and pencil.
From my point of view, the time of the night is also a constant feeling by all the characters of the story of melancholy, depression, mental heaviness, a premonition of new problems and tragedies: Everything hung in the air like a sword, our whole life, ready to collapse. In addition, it seems that the characters are constantly wandering in the dark, moving by touch. Ay, Alena, my distant daughter; My poor, impoverished daughter, ay, those exclamations of Anna Andrianovna, in my opinion, determine the tone of the whole story.
Thus, Petrushevskaya depicts a world in which a person does not realize the value of his life and the lives of other people, even those closest to him. In this work, we observe a terrible state of disunity, alienation of loved ones: children are not needed by parents, and vice versa. So, Anna Andrianovna writes about her children: They did not need my love. Or rather, without me they would have died, but at the same time, I personally interfered with them.
Finally, the time of night is a state of unbelief, a world without God. At the same time, hell is depicted as a continuation of life. It is the darkness and gloom of human existence. One can notice the absence of a religious principle in the worldview of all the characters in the story. Only the narrator herself has this idea, and even then it is vague, indefinite. And only at the end of the diary does she ask everyone for forgiveness and directly addresses God: Lord!!! Save and have mercy!
Such a state of mind inspires thoughts of hopelessness, the end of existence. My life is over, Anna Andrianovna declares several times. Such reflections are infinitely varied and become the leimotiv of the whole story. How quickly everything fades, how helplessly looking at yourself in the mirror! You are the same, but already everything ...; ...how an avalanche began to melt life, the narrator regrets. She beat her tail and wriggled in agony, so figuratively she defines her position in life.
Who is to blame for this endless suffering? Anna Andrianovna find the simplest explanation: Oh deceiver nature! Oh great! For some reason, she needs this suffering, this horror, blood, stench, sweat, mucus, convulsions, love, violence, pain, sleepless nights, hard work, everything seems to be fine! But no, and everything is bad again.
It can be seen that the way of presenting the events in this work is typical for the artistic style of Petrushevskaya. So, in the text of the manuscript of Anna Andrianovna, there are often no causal relationships, logical explanations for the actions of the characters. I think that this is done intentionally in order to increase the horror of the perception of the events described.
The lack of development of the characters of the story serves the same purpose. For example, we do not know what poems Anna Andrianovna writes. It is difficult to understand who Alena really loves and why she abandoned her son, but she herself is raising two other children. It is not entirely clear why her brother Andrei is in prison.
At the same time, one can notice that a certain schematism of the characters makes them generalized types, universal images. Before us arises, for example, the image of an innocent victim, in which almost all the heroes of the story find themselves.
So, Andrei is a victim of his truthful, but vulnerable nature, * a sufferer who shielded his eight friends with his chest. Timothy is a victim of family strife, a child of hunger, a closed child to tears. Alena is the victim of unfaithful men who left her. Anna Andrianovna herself is a victim of everyday circumstances and her life views. It is possible to designate more specific human types: an orphan (Timofey), a mother of a family (Anna Andrianovna and Alena as opposites of this image), a prostitute (Alena), an outcast (Andrey).
Such schematicity also implies the ambiguity of the characters, a different understanding of the essence of their characters. For example, who is Alena really a stupid woman and a bad mother? Or a dissatisfied person seeking love and understanding and therefore suffering? Or maybe it's just an adventurer, an indefatigable nature, thirsty for adventure? We cannot unequivocally answer these questions and give an objective assessment of the heroine.
However, the most difficult character in the story seems to me the narrator herself. I had the most conflicting impression of her. Is this a woman who sacrificed everything for the sake of her family, or an unsuccessful graphomaniac poetess (by Alena's definition), who made her children unhappy?
At first, the first definition seems to be true. However, behind the mean lines of the diary, Anna Andrianovna's second nature also comes through: a mentally unbalanced woman, a despotic person who steals and reads her daughter's diaries, eavesdrops at her door telephone conversations. She declares this almost with pride: All the news was mine.
The negative attitude of Anna Andrianovna to almost all the other characters in the story is also alarming. This is shown in the way she describes them in her diary. For example, the husband of one acquaintance with the physiognomy of a gorilla; a passer-by who has recognized himself is dirty, sweaty; own mother cobra; daughter busty noisy aunt; daughter's friend is a blacksmith with a mustache; daughter's husband is a scoundrel and a scoundrel.
At the same time, we again have an idea of ​​the circle of life, the repetition of situations and circumstances. So, the mother of Anna Andrianovna called her husband a parasite and dodger.
The mental health of the narrator also raises doubts. So, a strange story with pills for a horse, described by Anna Andrianovna herself, indicates the possible presence of hallucinations in her. On her crazy

I hint at the procession and the orderlies of the psychiatric hospital at the end of the story: You yourself need to, you need to go to a madhouse!; Yes, you need a doctor with a syringe!
In general, the theme of illness and madness is typical for L. Petrushevskaya's prose. In the story Time is Night, this theme reaches its limit. Illness is the natural state of heroes. On each of them lies the seal not only of spiritual suffering, but also of physical degeneration. Schizophrenia is a family curse. The paternal grandmother of little Timofey and the mother of Anna Andrianovna suffer from this disease. Alena is registered at the dispensary.
However, I think that the motif of illness here acquires a more philosophical, broader meaning: the whole world is spiritually ill, but people do not see and do not understand this. The narrator rightly assumes that there are many more lunatics outside the hospital. At the same time, she believes that the most important thing in life is love. Anna Andrianovna paradoxically loves her unlucky daughter, son, grandson, mother, and explains it in her own way: That is how nature is meant to love.
So, in the story Time to Night, a terrible, suffering, cruel world is shown, the wrong side of human relations is depicted. However, exposing the sinful essence of man, L. Petrushevskaya, like her heroine, nevertheless loves her reader. In my opinion, in this way this unusual writer makes us aware of the contradictions of our own life and calls to comprehend their position in the world: ...fat, sagging, dirty, come to your senses, people! You look like insects, but you demand love...
In my opinion, the author succeeded in this to the fullest!

The rights to the composition "Time is night" belong to its author. When citing material, it is necessary to indicate a hyperlink to

Requiem by Anna ("- Can you describe this?")

In the character of the main character of the story "Time: Night" Anna, two opposite tendencies are combined - self-affirmation and self-denial. Anna Andrianovna asserts herself through self-denial. Relatives do not repay her for all her incredible troubles, life ends, and the family is in complete discord and lack of money. The content of life is miserable: life and the search for livelihood. The fierce struggle of the heroine for the creation of the context of life, for her dignity, for identity with the poet and the community of experiences with children, which she leads in the family at the level of mutual moral destruction and in which she invests her main spiritual strength, is "time: night" - a graceless period , which "approached her," like "a long dark night," and which L. Petrushevskaya recreates in her story.

The words in quotation marks ("long dark night") belong to Anna Akhmatova in the retelling of Isaiah Berlin, who visited the famous poetess ("poet") on the eve of 1946. Akhmatova's words are associated with the title of the story, not only because the heroine of the story, Anna idolizes Akhmatova, being proud "Time: Night" is reminiscent of Akhmatova's famous state of "loneliness and isolation, both culturally and personally." Akhmatova also spoke about her impossibility to live a full life "Fountain House": "As the night wore on, Akhmatova became more and more animated ... She spoke of her loneliness and isolation, both culturally and personally ... She spoke of pre-revolutionary Petersburg - the city where she was formed, and of the long dark night that has since fallen upon her. ... No one has ever told me aloud anything that could even partly compare with what she told me about the hopeless tragedy of her life. "(Berlin Isaiah" Memoirs of Anna Akhmatova.

Akhmatova was also connected with the visit of Berlin by a number of important biographical events ("serious historical consequences"): in September 1946 she was expelled from the Writers' Union with derogatory epithets, deprived of ration cards, a listening device was installed in her room, she was being watched, and just now Returning after the end of the war and the capture of Berlin, the son Lev Gumilyov in 1949 was arrested a second time. Isaiah Berlin did not catch a direct connection with his visit in these misfortunes of Akhmatova, but he was struck by the network of hypotheses and the concepts of Anna Akhmatova herself built on them:

Her judgments about the personalities and actions of other people combined the ability to vigilantly and
shrewdly determine the most moral center of people and situations - and in this sense she
did not spare the closest friends - with fanatical confidence in attributing to people
motives and intentions, especially regarding oneself. Even to me, who often did not know
real facts, this ability to see hidden motives in everything often seemed
exaggerated, and sometimes fantastic. However, it is likely that I was not in
able to fully understand the irrational and sometimes incredibly whimsical character
Stalinist despotism. It is possible that even now normal criteria do not apply to him.
believable and fantastic. It seemed to me that on the premises in which she was
I am deeply convinced that Akhmatova created theories and hypotheses that she developed with amazing
connectivity and clarity. One such example of idees fixes was her unwavering
the conviction that our meeting had serious historical consequences. ... These
concepts seemed to have no visible factual basis. They were based on pure
intuitions, but were not meaningless, invented. On the contrary, they were all composite,
parts in a coherent conception of her life... (Berlin Isaiah)

From the meeting with Akhmatova, Berlin brought out a feeling that is in many respects similar to the impression left by Anna Andrianovna in the story of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Anna Andrianovna's judgments about the personalities and actions of other people are also sometimes fantastic, sometimes sharp-sighted and insightful. She, too, does not spare the closest people and can, with fanatical certainty, ascribe to people intentions regarding herself. The “irrational nature” of the “dark night” has been absorbing Anna Andrianovna for a long time, and the way she sees this “night” depends not only on herself, but also on what has been invested in her during her life. Moving along a certain piece world, immersed in her problems, she sees what she can see, and, partly for this reason, her interpretations of what is happening sometimes seem to be on the verge of insanity. self-consciousness, fighting for the survival of his "I" in the Soviet conditions.

In Petrushevskaya's story, the "dark night" of Soviet reality is constantly present outside the window, even in daytime in the form of the hopeless darkness of routine, the struggle for food and other material goods, scandals, tightness, monotony, longing from the impossibility of finding a way to self-realization, and implicitly there is a comparison famous poet Akhmatova and the largely failed poet Anna Andrianovna. Rather, Anna Andrianovna considers herself a poet, but what is behind this, what kind of poems is unknown. Only the prose of Anna Andrianovna, her diary, which is the content of the story of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, is known.

The gloomy reality of the night is the time of Anna Andrianovna, both literally and figuratively. Both creative inspiration and a painful sharpening of all feelings are connected with the night: she listens to see if anyone screams, if anyone needs help, if the police need to be called - an irrational mixture of a relapse of fear accumulated in several generations during the years of Stalinist terror, with faith that "my militia protects me." At night, Anna Andrianovna lives with all the true forces of her "I" and writes a confession in her diary. She cannot not write, otherwise she will be "torn apart": she lives all the best that she feels, what could be done and said, in the diary between the lines about what was done and what was said. The sublime poetic mood that she puts into her “notes” makes a paradoxical impression in combination with everyday, “shooting” content. Anna Andrianovna is counting on the fact that her diary, addressed to the "insightful" reader-fellow believer, reader-comrade-in-arms, will be read. At the same time, she writes spontaneously, from the heart: art is a thing not under control, and the diary arises as a cry of despair about the catastrophe of life and values. It turns out a kind of report from live broadcast soul, in which the history of Anna Andrianovna's family is refracted by her psychology, which largely follows the standards of Soviet ideas that have replaced other norms of life. Many spiritual discoveries made by Anna Andrianovna in her diary turn out to be a sensation, first of all for herself. She is trying to break through to understanding what is happening and to her spirituality through the capital infection with Soviet norms, and she succeeds in this in the last words of the diary, when "crazy love" becomes blessing and all-reconciling. But then she disappears into oblivion.

In the story "Time: Night" Petrushevskaya uses the genre of a diary in Lermontov's style. Anna Andrianovna, like Pechorin, herself creates a "collective portrait" of a woman, "composed of the vices of her generation in their full development." Petrushevskaya also offers the reader "with a spoiled stomach," the Soviet "reader who has been fed sweets for a long time," "bitter medicines, caustic truths." She uses the Pushkin-Lermontov trick, committing an "innocent forgery" and putting her name under "another's work," and calls it classically: "notes." (Or does Anna Andrianovna do this, as the heir to the classical tradition?) The death of the heroine gives L. Petrushevskaya the right to become a fictitious publisher and print notes. Petrushevskaya undoubtedly (she speaks about this directly in the announcement - true to another work - given below), following the "publisher" of Pechorin's diary, believes that "the history of the human soul, even the smallest soul, is almost more curious and not more useful than the history of the whole people". The author of "Time: Night" quite frankly follows the classical literary tradition, probably not considering this to be either epigonism or imitation, but, on the contrary, the assimilation of experience that has become the history of literature: it is beneficial and saving, as given by fate. Thus, the spiritual continuity of generations, comprehension and continuation of what has been absorbed is emphasized - “nothing happens from scratch”. The fate of the heroine, Anna Andrianovna, is also based on continuity.

In the story, continuity occurs primarily in the juxtaposition of two Annas: the recognized "saint" Akhmatova ("Karenina") and the unrecognized "sinful" "shooter", whose last name is not known (identity crisis) and to whom Petrushevskaya, as a publisher, grants the right to vote. "Saint" for Anna Andrianovna Akhmatova is her unfulfilled double.

Akhmatova wrote in her old age: "I taught women to speak - But, God, how to silence them?" Someone answered her that she was not accurate, that she taught not women to speak, but readers to listen to the content of women's poems and make sure that the voice of a woman poet can be no less significant than a man's. Having "taught" to speak or listen, Akhmatova, most importantly, was able to teach her to love her image: an independent-minded, spiritualized woman, now a lover, now a martyr, in whose tragic fate a drama of high love is played out. Thus she gave spiritual support and direction. Her poetic image is the path to spiritual survival, to overcoming death and to renewal. Through her poetic word, there is, as it were, a transformation of everyday events and low reality into the spiritual values ​​of one's own Self, on which life, further destiny and self-determination depend. Words, fanned by the content of high tragedy, bring into everything the meaning necessary in the daily life. Perhaps that is why her image filled the thirst for holiness in life.

For everyone, in languor glorifying your entrance, -
An earthly woman, but a heavenly cross for me!
I bow to you one night, -
And all your eyes look icons. (M. Tsvetaeva)

Akhmatova told Berlin how she "formed" in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg before "the long dark night fell upon her," i.e. before the start of the Soviet era. Pre-revolutionary Petersburg for Akhmatova was associated with an artistic lifestyle designed to serve a beautiful lady, spiritual independence and equality with a man. The heroine of the story, Anna Andrianovna, was formed already in the "Soviet night" ("Born in deaf years"), but she also counted on worshiping herself. Formally, laws that placed women in an unequal position with men were abolished immediately after the 1917 revolution; and after the Stalinist constitution (1936), the women's issue was considered finally resolved. But the reality of Soviet life has adjusted family and social equality not in favor of women. Soviet times led Anna Andrianovna to almost lose her female appearance. The farcical scene with a drug addict in the story, to whom Anna Andrianovna buys pills for her last pennies, and he writes down her phone number on a dirty matchbox, holding a pencil with difficulty in his swollen fingers, and kisses her hand, smeared with sunflower oil from chicks, parodies the artistic lifestyle and the admiration of a man for a beautiful lady.

The heroine of Petrushevskaya is adapted in her own way to the cruel life circumstances in which she is forced to live. She is aware of a certain layer of the reality of the Soviet world to the extent that consciousness does not prevent her from maintaining vitality. Soviet reality is a literary-mythical atmosphere created on the basis of official ideologemes and literary images, and its own micro-myths were created in it, although they were in severe discord with actual reality, but allowing them to maintain spiritual homeostasis, live and work. In this world, the character of Anna Andrianovna was formed, worshiping Akhmatova and calling the police to her house in case of disagreement. But Anna Andrianovna feels her deep kinship with Akhmatova, and not only because of her name and poems. She, like Akhmatova, is wounded by the tragic fate of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.

In Soviet times, Anna Akhmatova was called Anna Karenina of the 20th century (the poet A. Kushner wrote about the identification of Anna Akhmatova with Anna Karenina, based on the notes of L.K. Chukovskaya), and her image in a certain sense merged with the literary heroine. Akhmatova in life sought to "take revenge" for the humiliation and catastrophe of Tolstoy's Anna. (Berlin describes Akhmatova's dispute with Tolstoy's view of Karenina in her Memoirs of Anna Akhmatova.) The themes of Karenin's fate: the meeting of mother and son, “love to break”, love delirium, a nightmare, her own death as a punishment for the delinquent – ​​Anna Andrianovna also lives, capturing them in her diary. The end of Anna Andrianovna's life and the purpose of her diary is a kind of finale for Anna Karenina. She, like Akhmatova, is trying to overcome the humiliation of Tolstoy's heroine, that is, her own catastrophe.

Unlike "A Hero of Our Time" with its two prefaces, there are no direct author's comments on Anna Andrianovna's diary. The word graphomaniac, which her daughter calls Anna or which Petrushevskaya could entrust to her daughter in order to express the author's opinion about Anna, does not in the least contribute to the integral image of the heroine - if only because we owe our acquaintance with everything that happens in the story to the diary. It is unlikely that Petrushevskaya trusts her opinion to any of the heroes - there are no "heroes". Opinions are fleeting and either relate to a very specific situation or represent idees fixes in the minds of the characters. In addition, the characters can transform into their antipodes: the gentle, romantically in love Alena (probably Anna was the same) becomes cynical, the desperately brave Andrey turns into a helpless alcoholic who deceives her mother all the money, and the cynical and cruel Anna is capable of deep unselfish feeling. It seems that Lyudmila Petrushevskaya does not know the "truth" either: she is "biased." Mercilessly exposing the weaknesses and vices of her heroine, she does not detract from the tragedy of her personal fate. She knows what mental losses the heroine is doomed to and how much it hurts her when her soul clenched into a fist breaks through another scandal. Ten years before the story "Time: Night" in the announcement for her play "Three Girls in Blue" (1982), Petrushevskaya, like Lermontov's fictitious publisher, proposed replacing the judging approach to the characters with an understanding of them and through this awareness of oneself:

"Who needs ordinary person? Who needs this woman, with her preoccupation, hands red from washing, with such rare moments of peace ...? Or an old woman who tells her stories so loudly because she is used to not being listened to, and is in a hurry to speak out while there is a living person nearby, because she lives alone ... We walk past them, do not pay attention to them - and they US. But each person is a huge world. Each person is the final link in a long chain of generations and the ancestor of a new line of people. He was a beloved child, a tender child, eyes like stars, a toothless smile, it was his grandmother, mother and father who were bending over him, he was bathed and loved ... And they released him into the world. And now a new small hand clings to his hand ..... To think about the life of another person, to bow before his courage, to shed a tear over someone else's fate, as over his own, to breathe a sigh of relief when salvation comes. In the theater, sometimes there is such a rare opportunity - to understand another person. And understand yourself."

This announcement echoes the words and intonations of Anna Andrianovna, when she, trying to understand herself, writes in her diary about her unspoken feelings, and does not act in accordance with generally accepted standards: she does not call on the public for help in order to marry her pregnant daughter Alena to the culprit Sasha, does not call the police to expel Alena and Sasha's friends, does not turn off the refrigerator to prove to Sasha and her daughter that she is not obliged to feed them, does not instill fear in violators of the imaginary order outside the window. Everywhere where Anna Andrianovna invests her social and educational intentions, she misses everywhere: even if the marriage succeeded, Alena hated her mother instead of gratitude for her help. Everything Anna is used to, what she has been taught, what she can rely on - everything is adapted to the everyday cynicism of life around her. Her independent lyrical note of character is weak and undeveloped.

The history of Anna's small family absorbed the features of the Soviet era right up to the vague perestroika period (N. Leiderman). The family of Anna Andrianovna is, as it were, a micromodel of Soviet society: it has its own leader - Anna, who overthrew her mother, Baba Sima, and sent her to a psychiatric hospital. Aspiring with her soul to abstract higher goals, Anna diligently promotes what she has learned from Soviet mythologies: she conducts educational work, brings to light, exercises total control, arranges studies of alien elements and purges with "streltsy executions" (see note). She is the bearer of the Soviet mentality and the story of her life is a reduced to the size of a family, the Soviet way of life with all its forms of communication and rituals: feeding, fighting around the "material base," faulty valves in public places, queuing for the bath, drunken plumbers who it is necessary to give a ruble so that they agree to work - everything is familiar and familiar to their own people and quite comical from the outside.

In hereditary memory, Anna Andrianovna received the scandals and jealousy of her mother, Soviet educational principles and "crazy love." Anna's mother considered her daughter's love affairs debauchery and hoped that real, "crazy" love should be directed to her mother. When Anna had children, Baba Sima began to fight Anna for the love of her grandchildren, protecting them from Anna. Annin's husband, unable to bear the jealousy of his mother-in-law, fled, becoming indifferent to the children. Anna does not have a life separate from her children, and they do not allow her to live for them, investing their content in them, she interferes with them. Compensating for the poverty of her personal life by fighting for her dignity, she makes scenes, and the children laugh in her face and say that she is a complete fool. Now Anna is madly in love with her grandson Tim, whom she, unconsciously repeating her mother, protects from her daughter Alena.

In her youth, Anna worked in the editorial office, but she was asked to leave because of an affair with a married artist, whose three children she was going to raise. "Stupid stupid!" she laments now in her diary. Following the example of many, she found a way out of the impasse in the archaeological expedition, where she made her "another grand mistake in people." As a result - "Andrey and Alyonushka, two suns, all in one room." The archaeologist moved from Kuibyshev to Anna, and ten years later "following the same scenario" followed to Krasnodar. And Baba Sima triumphed, just as Anna herself triumphs, getting rid of her husband Alena. "Everything has gone, but what doesn't look gone from the outside?" - Anna asks in her diary.

Fate deprived Anna of gratitude in the memory of her once close people: instead of the news from her beloved, which Akhmatova received either in poetry or in music, Anna and Alena receive meager alimony, and even those with the help of public bodies, to which Anna is willing resorts to solve intractable life problems. But in the main, public bodies could not protect the rights of Anna's family, they did not want to: her son Andrei was imprisoned. He came out of prison a broken man. Not putting Anna in anything else, Andrei plays a scene in front of her, swearing that he will stop drinking. He deceives all the money from her, and Anna does not feel false. In her diary, she writes that only once she lied, telling her daughter Alena that Andrei was still drinking. And this is where she was right. Anna made a mistake not only because the "crazy love" for her son has not died and she wants to believe him no matter what. She, like many others, relies on external theatrical effects - intuition, processed by Soviet artistic models, could not cope with a sense of reality. In the end, all of them: Anna, Andrei and Alena are left in the world without any support, they find themselves in the position of victims - unfortunate, mentally perforated. Who wants to be a victim? And they, like others, are fighting for their interests. Their family struggle in the story looks tragic-comic, parodying the understanding of a just class struggle based on the distribution of material values.

Anna hopes to solve the complex spiritual problems through which one must painfully struggle through in the Soviet way, with the help of a psychiatrist and government agencies. Under the institutionalized Soviet way of life, the fear of being different from everyone else, and therefore either an enemy of the people or crazy, was one of the ways to create a cruel paradigm of mass consciousness, and the word ‘madhouse’ firmly entered everyday life. Nothing new was invented in Soviet society, as it was in Russia in the 19th century (for example, the situation with Chaadaev), and before the revolution (for example, in 1910, contemporaries unanimously called an art exhibition a "hospital for the mentally ill"). The Soviet era simply profitably used existing stereotypes and, destroying it, proclaimed humanity on behalf of Chekhov's "Chamber No. 6." It is this paradox, this type of "schizophrenia" that embodies Anna's family, a micromodel of Soviet society.

Anna summons an incognito doctor from the psychiatric hospital to her house and secretly registers her daughter. The doctor, in accordance with the Soviet spirit to exercise social supervision, comes under a false name to the house and demands that Alena tell him why she is not at the institute. Mother Sima, who lost her nerve in a common family tragedy with Andrei, Anna sends to the famous Kashchenko psychiatric hospital. The doctor in the hospital confidently says that Baba Sima has schizophrenia and that she will be "treated". Baba Sima, "treating" for the seventh year, slowly dies outside the walls of the house as a spent and useless person, and this is called progressive schizophrenia. (True, the responsible Anna regularly goes to feed her mother, who is not starving anyway, but all other contacts, except for feeding, are destroyed by intra-family conflicts). Indeed, it is more convenient for life to believe a doctor and attribute all problems to progressive schizophrenia.

The heroes of the story cannot enter into each other's position and sympathize; they torment and torment each other, drive each other crazy from being hurt by each other and social oppression. Everyone lives in the desert of human relationships, in a spiritual vacuum. "Ay!" Is this vacuum called schizophrenia? In the story of schizophrenia, no one really knows anything, but everyone follows the routine like a routine, trying to fit into the "norm". But there is no norm, the Soviet "norm" is only imaginary, and is it possible? Isn't it an impossible ideal, this general "norm" imagined by everyone in their own way, and isn't it all appealed to and "executed" in its name?

Anna is the mistress of the house. She undoubtedly loves children, if not real ones, but those that are in her imagination. She is running out of strength, and she wants the children to repay her with devotion and love: "I give you the last, and you ?!" Therefore Anna's love takes the form of hatred; an endless conversation about money, to whom who owes - this is the translation of the unsaid into material values, a form of struggle for love and respect. Feeding children is the most important, if not the only way to express love. Anna's food and incredible efforts to obtain it should, in her opinion, bring the family together, and the children separate, preferring the company and trust of friends. It's insulting and bitter: traitors - and therefore she "keeps the defense", sows discord, seeks to reveal secrets and convict: eavesdrops on telephone conversations, peeps through the keyhole, reads her daughter's diary. Take control, and punish for betrayal and depravity - that's what burns her with fire from the inside.

Consciously drawing a parallel between herself and Akhmatova (Karenina), Anna Andrianovna brings to life the unconsciously assimilated line of Comrade Stalin. In addition, human nature manifests itself in this way, and both Stalin and Anna Andrianovna’s thirst for love and devotion turns into suspicion, a thirst for their own triumph and revenge from wounding. And not the desired "wake up and sing" accompanies poor Anna's family in the morning, but "as it were, a group scene of a shooting execution." Anna Andrianovna almost involuntarily plays the role of a tyrant and, like Akhmatova, she feels herself inscribed in history.

Anna's diary reads like a book of a woman's life, deceived by her hopes. Her voice is a multitude of voices, arguing with everyone, "not sparing those closest." This is the whole "I" of her voice: in endless conflicts and disputes, rarely thanks (blessings to all those who helped, entered her position) and in a passing story about herself and her feelings. So almost everyone, probably, lived, including Akhmatova, on that "night," at that time - all the heroes of the story live like that. But if Anna Akhmatova, who retained the uniqueness of her personality, had where to put "the ability to vigilantly and penetratingly determine the most moral center of people and situations", then such a quality in the neurasthenic, driven and impersonal Anna Andrianovna looks more like malicious malice, and especially with the end Soviet period: look at yourself, who are you - everyone could tell her. And that makes her time of night even darker. She has to prove herself to the end.

Both Anna Andrianovna and her daughter Alyona, although they received a higher education, did not receive a spiritual inheritance (N. Leiderman), spiritual joy - except for sadness about their own crippled personality. They hate first of all themselves and everything that they got in life. But there is nowhere to go. As Petrushevskaya wrote in the "Ninth volume": no one aspires to the crowd, to this dump: everyone is pushed there by necessity. But if you look closely, the crowd consists of people, and everyone is worthy of love and respect, even if only because they were weak babies, and will be weak old people.

Anna Andrianovna Lyudmila Petrushevskaya manages to "be saved", that is, in her, to the end, a certain incarnable spiritual essence, responsible for the personality, is preserved. Unable to change anything in the situation with her mother, she returns home with the intention of taking part in the upbringing of her grandchildren. From the silence in the house, in her inflamed, Soviet literary imagination, a picture arises of the murdered infant grandchildren at the hands of her daughter Alena. Expecting to see corpses, she enters the room and sees that Alena has taken everyone away from her, leaving her alone. And she is happy: "they left alive ..." The enumeration of all their names is "Lord, bless."

Thus, the story leaves hope, although the life of the heroine ends with the end of the diary, and the new post-Soviet reality does not give any encouraging signals about itself. There is hope to the extent that uncontrived optimism is possible: family life continues, there is already an experience of salvation, and the diary has been printed. Did Alyona recognize Anna, saying: "She was a poet"? Or did she get rid of the past, having fulfilled her duty to her mother and not knowing that "in the manuscripts" of her mother and her diary? Or did Alena herself become an "unrecognized poet," deliberately giving her diary to the readers? It is only clear that Petrushevskaya wants both confessional diaries to be preserved for posterity. A fictitious publisher, she also acts as a phenomenologist who knows the art of accurately understanding the spiritual content of a person of the Soviet era, and considers it necessary to give him, or rather her, a driven woman, a hero of her time, the right to vote. The life of the heroine in the story "Time: Night" undoubtedly "could at least partly be compared with what Akhmatova told [Berlin] about the hopeless tragedy of her life."

*Notes:

Berlin Isaiah "Meetings with Russian "writers" from "Memories of Anna Akhmatova." - M .: Soviet writer, 1991. - S. 436-459. ttp://www.akhmatova.org/articles/berlin.htm I. Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga. In 1915-1919. his family lived in Petrograd. In 1920, I. Berlin emigrated to England with his family, graduated from Oxford University, and lectured on philosophy at the New College in Oxford. In 1945-46. I. Berlin - 2nd Secretary of the British Embassy in the USSR. In Leningrad, by coincidence, he had the opportunity to visit Akhmatova in the so-called "Fountain House", where she lived.

Anna Andrianovna in her diary, like Anna Akhmatova in verse, repeatedly recalls the "streltsy execution" [from the streltsy execution (1698), revenge on the rebels, Peter I began a transformative tyranny in the name of the glory of his beloved fatherland]. For example, in "Requiem" Akhmatova's lyrical heroine is a "shooter's wife"; She mourns her husband and son: “I will be like archery wives / Howling under the Kremlin towers.” And Anna Andrianovna describes the approach of death in her diary in the images of the execution of the archers: “The white, muddy morning of the execution has come.”

Chronicle of the life of a late Soviet family, written on behalf of the mother - an elderly poetess. Petrushevskaya plunges the reader into the small-sized hell of the 1980s: lack of money, shortages, family squabbles, screaming children and feeble-minded old people - and in her presentation these everyday details begin to look like signs of fate, symbols of human fate, which no one can escape.

comments: Polina Ryzhova

What is this book about?

The story is written on behalf of the elderly poetess Anna Andrianovna, who shares in her diary the details of her family squabbles. Her life is spent in caring for relatives: daughter Alena, who gave birth to three children from three men, son Andrey, who had just returned from prison, mother Sima, who is in a psychiatric hospital, and her ardently adored grandson Timochka, whose curls “smell of phloxes”, and urine - "chamomile meadow". An extremely specific, private situation here takes on the character of a parable, and everyday troubles rise to the level of fatal predestination.

Ludmila Petrushevskaya. 1991 Photo for the German publishing house Rowohlt, where the book "Time is Night" was first published

When was it written?

Petrushevska began writing "Time is Night" in 1988 in Stockholm, where she came to playwrights' congress, and finished in 1990 in Krakow. The end of perestroika is the time when fame comes to the writer. After decades of existence outside the official literary field, she releases her long-awaited first book, a collection of stories "Immortal Love", and is in demand abroad: her prose is translated, plays are staged, invitations to festivals come, in 1991 she is awarded a German Pushkin Prize of the Alfred Töpfer Foundation One of the most prestigious literary awards in Russia in the 1990s. Established by the foundation of the German entrepreneur Alfred Töpfer. In addition to Petrushevskaya, Bella Akhmadulina, Sasha Sokolov, Andrey Bitov, Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, Timur Kibirov, Yuri Mamleev became its laureates. The cash reward was 40,000 German marks (at the rate of 2001 - about half a million rubles). The award closed in 2005. ⁠ . In order not to lose herself and preserve her creative independence, Petrushevskaya goes to work on a new text, the story “Time night" 1 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 458-463. ⁠ .

Museum ART4

How is it written?

In the form of a continuous monologue: one topic clings to another, the text turns into a continuous stream of memories, maxims, confessions. Logical pauses occur only a few times along with the mention of the offensive new night- It is at night that the heroine keeps a diary. Anna Andrianovna includes in her text excerpts from the diary of her daughter Alena, which she read without asking, and individual passages written on behalf of her daughter (“as if her memories”). In terms of language, “Time is Night” reproduces ordinary oral speech, the speech of “crowds and gossip” (to use the wording of Petrushevskaya), but adorned with purely literary “irregularities”. It is stylistic shifts that create a mythological dimension in Petrushevskaya's realistic text, or, in the words of the literary critic Mark Lipovetsky, "the effect of metaphysical drafts."

They didn't need my love. Or rather, without me, they would have died, but at the same time, I personally interfered with them. Paradosk! As Nyura says, the bones are gouging neighbor

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

For the first time, "Time is Night" was published in 1991 in German, by the Berlin publishing house Rowohlt. The story was published in Russian in 1992 in the Novy Mir magazine. For the Novomir version, Petrushevskaya adds a telephone prologue to the text - a scene of a conversation with Alena, Anna Andrianovna's daughter, who asks the author to publish the dead mother's notes and then sends them by mail. Petrushevskaya mentions the death of the heroine, fearing that readers will take the text of the work for her personal diary. It had already been like this several years earlier, after the publication of the story “My Circle”, also written in the first person: “After finishing“ Time is Night ”, I thought hard, and would embittered readers not kill me for such deeds? For Anna Andrianovna in the first person and for all her thoughts and words? And I thought, thought, and finally, in the Russian version, I took her life and thereby covered problem" 2 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 454. ⁠ . In 1993, “Time is Night” was published in the book “On the Road of the God Eros” and later repeatedly reprinted as part of collections.

Moscow, 1986

Moscow, 1988

Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

What influenced her?

Most of all - the poetics of Mikhail Zoshchenko. In Petrushevskaya's story, as in Zoshchenko's stories, ordinary heroes act, the everyday, seemingly unremarkable side of life becomes the subject of artistic reflection: kitchen gossip, vulgar scandals, petty intrigues. Poetic tropes are absurdly mixed with clichés and stationery, giving rise to linguistic oxymoronism. The influence of the 1960s and 70s is noticeable: “Moscow stories” by Yuri Trifonov and plays by Alexander Vampilov. Anna Andrianovna herself, with her outbursts of self-abasement and at the same time painful pride, is a kind of hybrid of Gogol's Akaky Akakievich and the lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova's poems, and the foolish irony that emerges through the stream of suffering makes the heroine also a literary relative. Petrushevskaya's personal experience also influenced the creation of the story. Before perestroika, the writer lived with three children in a small two-room apartment, just like Anna Adrianovna, fleeing hunger, worked as a magazine reviewer and conducted seminars in creative houses - there “they fed and could secretly bring and feed the child, or even two" 3 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 238. ⁠ .

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya with children Fedor, Natalya and granddaughter Anya. 1985

From personal archive Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

How was it received?

Readers perceived the story as "darkness", a shocking text about the unsightly aspects of life in the USSR. In the early 1990s, Petrushevskaya is seen as an accusatory writer who reveals the whole truth about the beggarly existence of the Soviet "little man." In a similar way, the story is treated abroad, for a Western audience “Time is Night” - one of the first frank descriptions of life in the late USSR: “They perceived my things purely as Russian exotics. Well, there are Chinese eyes, Mongolian salt tea with bacon, Korean dog food, Eskimos generally live in the snow, shamans spin and howl. Well, Petrushevskaya also sings something. Heavy Russian trawl-wali life, don't be scared, it has nothing to do with you! This is about an exceptionally heavy share of Russian women. On the amateur" 4 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 461. ⁠ .

However, the artistic merits of the story were immediately obvious to literary critics. Znamya critic Natalya Ivanova called Petrushevskaya's text "publication of the year" and noted that an ancient tragedy is hidden behind the everyday story about an unsettled life: "It's not people who act here, but Rock" 5 Ivanova N. Unsaid // Banner. 1993. No. 1. C. 143. ⁠ . In 1992, "Time is Night" was shortlisted for the first non-state literary award "Russian Booker", along with "Laz" by Vladimir Makanin and "Hearts of Four" by Vladimir Sorokin. Petrushevskaya is the favorite, but the victory was awarded to Mark Kharitonov for his novel The Line of Fate, or Milashevich's Chest, which caused violent indignation in the literary environment. According to critics, in the first year of its existence, Booker missed the mark, and this miss set off a long string of controversial jury decisions.

“Time is Night” becomes the canonical text of Petrushevskaya, literary critics discover metaphysical depths behind “black” naturalism and fit it into the context of Russian and Western European literature. Petrushevskaya herself is gaining a reputation as a classic, and her prose is included in the school curriculum. True, discussions about her work do not stop, sometimes the most curious ones: for example, in 2017, Siberian Orthodox activists demanded that the story “Glitch” be removed from the school curriculum as allegedly containing “drug propaganda”.

Petrushevskaya does not confine herself to the tradition of realistic prose, but constantly experiments: either she writes mystical stories (the cycles “Where I was”, “Songs of the Eastern Slavs”), then “linguistic” fairy tales (the cycle “Byatye Puski”), then poems (the collection “Paradoski ”), then a series of children's books about Peter the pig, which became a meme on the Russian Internet. By the end of the 2000s, her experiments went beyond literature - Petrushevskaya paints pictures, makes cartoons, sings and makes hats.

Semyon Faibisovich. Family portrait in the interior. Diptych. 1982 Regina Gallery

When does the story take place?

During the period of Soviet stagnation, probably in the 1980s. But there is no need to talk about any historical accuracy of Anna Andrianovna's stories. Literally on the first pages of the diary, the heroine describes an incident that happened to a friend: “She, then a student, ran after the car and cried, then he threw an envelope out of the window, and in the envelope (she stopped to pick it up) there were dollars, but not a lot. He was a professor on Lenin's theme." The episode, based on the logic of the story, is 15 years away from the real Anna Andrianovna (when she still had a husband and a little daughter). But in the USSR, before perestroika, strict currency legislation was in effect, foreign currency could be in the hands of diplomats, international journalists, artists and athletes traveling abroad, but it is unlikely that a “professor on the Lenin topic” would have it. And even more so, it is unlikely that the professor would have dared to throw dollars out of the car window - everything related to the currency caused special alertness in Soviet society and tension 6 Ivanova A. Shops "Birch": paradoxes of consumption in the late USSR. M.: New Literary Review, 2017. C. 54-63. ⁠ . Anna Andrianovna generally has a difficult relationship with time - for example, she says that for a part-time job she once wrote an article about the "bicentenary of the Minsk Tractor Plant", after which she was driven away - the first Russian tractor could not come off the assembly line in the 18th century .

Critic Boris Kuzminsky, in his review of The Time is Night, concludes that it is impossible to determine the exact time of the action of the story: “The incredibly concrete world of this prose is indifferent to historical specifics. It is as if laid under the course of epochs by a layer of damp foam rubber, it always exists. “Time is night” incorporates the sum of the features of the Soviet era, a conditional zeitgeist. At the same time, Petrushevskaya is not interested in the Soviet myth, she is interested in life itself, shaped by this myth.

Everything hangs, flutters, everything is in balls, lobules, veins and rods, as if on ropes. This is not old age yet, burnt sweetness, yesterday's curd mass, the wort of foreign kvass, as I wrote in my youth from fright when I saw the neckline of my friend

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

Does the heroine really have no money for anything, or is she shying away?

According to the stories of Anna Andrianovna, it seems that she lives in extreme poverty: she keeps a diary in pencil because she cannot afford a fountain pen, goes to neighbors to feed her grandson and eat a little herself, begs for a potato from the props of a children's theatrical performance, because from it you can cook a "second course". In general, the heroine is fixated on food, on who eats how much and at whose expense - for example, she accuses her son-in-law that he eats her family, driving her daughter Alena into a frenzy. The same claim was once made to the husband of Anna Andrianovna herself by her mother (Baba Sima). “There was always something wrong with food among members of our family, poverty is to blame,” the heroine sums up.

In the meantime, if we sum up the income that Anna Andrianovna mentions, a not so hopeless picture emerges: she receives a pension for herself, as well as for Baba Sima, who is in the hospital, works part-time in a magazine (“a ruble is a letter, there are sixty letters in month") and performs twice a month in front of children in the houses of creativity ("performance eleven rubles"). Even if we take the minimum amount of pensions for calculation, then the total monthly income of Anna Andrianovna is still close to the size of the average salary in the USSR. Svetlana Pakhomova in the Zvezda magazine compares the heroes of Petrushevskaya with the socially close heroes of Yuri Trifonov, who are also preoccupied with everyday problems, but they never face the question of survival: and secretly eaten by someone from the household. By and large, poverty and hunger appearing in Petrushevskaya's texts have nothing to do with the traditionally realistic depiction of Soviet and post-Soviet reality. Probably, Anna Andrianovna's obsession with food should not be regarded as a marker of social trouble or proof of her greed, but as a subconscious desire to be needed by her family. In her world, feeding children is the only way to express love for them, and the more difficult it is to get food, the more significant this feeling seems.

Crush in line for cakes. Moscow, 1985

Shelf in a store, typical for last year Soviet history. 1991

Dick Rudolph/TASS

Is Anna Andrianovna a real poetess?

It depends on what is considered confirmation of this status. A poetess - more precisely, a poet ( as bequeathed by Tsvetaeva Tsvetaeva preferred to call herself not a poetess, but a poet. “There are signs of division in poetry more significant than belonging to the male or female sex, and being disdainful of everyone bearing any stigma of female (mass) separateness, such as: female courses, suffragism, feminism, the Salvation Army, all the notorious female question, with the exception of its military resolution: the fabulous kingdoms of Penthezileia - Brunnhilde - Marya Morevna - and the no less fabulous Petrograd women's battalion (I stand for the cutting schools, however) ”- from the memoirs of Tsvetaeva. ⁠ ) - the heroine considers herself. Those around this opinion partly share: Anna Andrianovna speaks with poems in the houses of creativity, publishes two poems in a poetry magazine by the Eighth of March (“a fee of eighteen rubles together”), is waiting for the release of her book of poems (“They will recalculate my pension, I will receive more”). She is constantly in dialogue with high culture: in place and out of place she recalls Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, inserts literary allusions (“the guests did not let the folk trail dry up in our apartment”). Petrushevskaya plays on contrasts: the purely everyday content of the diaries is combined with the pathetic mood of its author. “The most vile thing in “Time is Night” is not the pictures of urban life, adjusted according to the drawings of an experienced designer of torture machines, but the pathos that the narrator imposes on everyday life,” remarks Boris Kuzminsky.

Anna Andrianovna quotes herself several times in her diary. Here, for example, is one of her poems:

"A terrible dark force, a blind insane passion - at the feet of a beloved son like prodigal son fell"

The fragment is very short in order to draw far-reaching conclusions from it, but you can see that the verses are made quite professionally: good assonant rhymes, rhythmic play, aphoristic comparisons. However, the lines are excessively pretentious and sententious, in fact, like her diary.

Anna Andrianovna herself feels a deep kinship with Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, her "mystical namesake". It was during perestroika, when Petrushevskaya wrote "Time is Night", that Akhmatova's "Requiem" was published for the first time, and Akhmatova's poetry became known to a large circle of Soviet readers and turned into a symbol of high literature. Parody, at first glance, the comparison of Anna Andrianovna with Anna Andreevna gradually acquires an ever deeper meaning. The diaries of Petrushevskaya's heroine are titled "Notes on the edge of the table" - an obvious reference to Anatoly Naiman's memoirs about Akhmatova ("One of the guests began to complain to her that her friend, a writer worthy of all respect, was given a small two-room cottage in Maleevka, while a mediocre, but to the secretary of the Union - a luxurious five-room apartment. When the door closed behind her, Akhmatova said: "Why did she tell me this? I wrote all my poems on the windowsill or on the edge of something") 7 Nyman A. Stories about Anna Akhmatova. M.: Fiction, 1989. S. 163. ⁠ . Like her namesake, Anna Andrianovna is forced to fight for survival every day, proudly confront adversity, she is also waiting for her son from prison. For the heroine of The Time is Night, the status of a poet has nothing to do with poetry itself; rather, it is a way of being. In the world of Petrushevskaya, art tends to be brought to life in the most literal way, everyday vulgarity, and in the meantime, everyday vulgarity itself becomes art.

Anna Akhmatova. Komarovo, 1963. Photo of Joseph Brodsky

akhmatova.spb.ru

Why is the relationship between mother and daughter so important in the story?

In "Time is Night" Baba Sima and Anna Andrianovna, Anna Andrianovna and Alena repeat so much life paths each other, which almost merge into one character. The mother here perceives her daughter as an extension of herself, therefore she constantly violates the personal boundaries of the child. One of the strongest points in the story is Anna Andrianovna's detailed commentary on the scene of her daughter's first sex, taken from her personal diary. Unceremonious interference in personal life, of course, causes anger on the part of Alena and, at the same time, a desire to take revenge: while the mother advises her daughter to “wash her panties”, the daughter warns her mother against being infected with “pubic lice”. Alena is the only character who incriminates main character“Time is night” in graphomania, while the accusation is dictated by the spirit of rivalry - literary ambitions, judging by the diary, Alena herself also has.

In Petrushevskaya's prose, the relationship between mother and daughter is one of the central motifs. For example, in the story “There is someone in the house”, the author combines mother and daughter in one character, calling him “mother-daughter”, “md”. In the play Befem, the metaphor is realized: a two-headed woman, a daughter and a mother in one body, enters the stage. In the texts of Petrushevskaya, the inseparable existence of mother and daughter is associated with mutual torment. But there is still hope for release: Alyona’s desire to posthumously publish Anna Andrianovna’s manuscript, in which her text is also present, can be regarded both as recognition of her mother’s literary abilities (“she was a poet”), and as recognition of their mutual right to selfhood.

Semyon Faibisovich. Garbage dumped near the neighboring apartment number 1. 1987. Regina Gallery

Courtesy of Regina Gallery

Is “Time to Night” a feminist or anti-feminist work?

In Petrushevskaya's prose, with rare exceptions, female heroines always act. Therefore, her texts are defined as "women's prose" (along with the texts of Tatyana Tolstaya, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Dina Rubina, Victoria Tokareva), as well as "anti-feminine version of women's prose" 8 Wall Josephine. The Minotaur in the Maze: Remarks on Lyudmila Petrushevskaya // World Literature Today: A Literatury Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma. Vol. 67. No. 1. 1993. P. 125-126. ⁠ , since the heroines of Petrushevskaya resemble little feminine women.

The family in the “Time is Night” is arranged according to the principle of matriarchy. A man in this system either leaves voluntarily (sometimes out the window, as in the case of Andrei's son), or he is kicked out by the matriarch, accusing him of parasites: Baba Sima outlives Anna Andrianovna's husband, Anna Andrianovna outlives Alena's husband. Petrushevskaya grotesquely reproduces the pseudo-egalitarian model of the family, common in the Soviet and post-Soviet times. The gender equality officially proclaimed in the USSR did not give the woman equal rights, but rather added a new burden - in addition to caring for children and doing housework, she also had to earn money (sociologists called this situation a “working mother’s contract”). In such a system, a man often finds himself out of work, so the need for his stay in the family from an economic point of view is rightly called into question. In Vremya Noch, Petrushevskaya literally embodies the joke that half of Russian children were raised in same-sex families by mothers and grandmothers. "And I have seen such female families, mother, daughter and Small child, a complete family! - Anna Andrianovna bitterly sneers.

Despite the fact that the heroines of Petrushevskaya are mostly unhappy, wretched and comical (or even resemble “genderless, asexual, shabby beings tortured by everyday life, tending to zero in the limit”), Petrushevskaya can well be called one of the first post-Soviet feminist writers, since she explores a woman not from the point of view of external attitudes, but from within her world.

Why is Anna Andrianovna so obsessed with her grandson? This is fine?

Not really. Her feelings for the boy Tima border on romantic passion: she constantly enthusiastically describes his curls, legs, arms, eyelashes, asks the boy to call himself Anna and is jealous of him for her daughter. At the same time, Anna Andrianovna herself suspects that her feelings for her grandson are somewhat unhealthy: “Parents in general, and grandparents in particular, love small children with carnal love that replaces everything for them. Sinful love, I will tell you, the child from it only becomes callous and loosens his belt, as if he understands that the matter is unclean. She boldly convicts those around her that “the case is unclean”: noticing that a man in a tram kisses his daughter on the lips, she makes a scandal (“I can imagine that you are doing things with her at home! This is a crime!”), accuses her son-in-law of pedophilia because he became too attached to his son (“Keep in mind,” I said to Alena, somehow going out into the corridor. “Your husband has the makings of a pederast. He loves the boy”). But this does not mean that the heroine has bad plans for her grandson, Anna Andrianovna's "carnal love" for Tim is, first of all, admiration for his purity. In the world of Anna Andrianovna, full of “blood, sweat and mucus”, it is purity that is the greatest value, and bodily purity is equal to spiritual purity. It is not for nothing that the heroine stands under the shower for hours and constantly asks the already adult son Andrey and the adult daughter Alena to wash, which, of course, infuriates both of them.

Children are the embodiment of conscience. Like angels, they anxiously ask their questions, then stop and become adults. Shut up and live. They understand that they are powerless. Nothing can be done and no one can do anything

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

Is there anything good and bright in "Vremya noch" at all?

Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir, asked a similar question in relation to Petrushevskaya's first stories. In 1968, he did not publish them, accompanying the refusal with the comment “Talented, but painfully gloomy. Can't it get brighter? - BUT. T." 9 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 286. ⁠ .

Nevertheless, for all the gloom and repulsive naturalism of the world described in it, the story "Time is Night" can be perceived as a text about enduring love and eternal order. Mark Lipovetsky and Naum Leiderman discover traces of idyll 10 Leiderman N., Lipovetsky M. Modern Russian Literature - 1950-90s. In 2 vols. M.: Academy, 2003. S. 622-623. ⁠ . If we rely on the definition given by Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the main signs of an idyll is the inseparability of life from “a specific spatial corner where fathers and children lived, children and grandchildren will live” (in “Vremya noch” such a corner is a two-room small apartment). Another feature of the idyll is “its strict limitation only to the few basic realities of life. Love, birth, death, marriage, work, food and drink, ages” (the content of “The Time is Night” is by and large limited to these topics). And finally, “the neighborhood of food and children is typical of an idyll” (food and children are the central motifs of the story). In relation to “The Time is Night”, Lipovetsky and Leiderman use the term “anti-idyll” and come to the conclusion that the signs of the repetition of events in combination with the techniques of the idyllic genre form the main paradox of the story and all Petrushevskaya’s prose as a whole: “What seems to be the self-destruction of the family turns out to be repeated , the cyclic form of its stable existence" 11 Leiderman N., Lipovetsky M. Modern Russian Literature - 1950-90s. In 2 vols. M.: Academy, 2003. C. 623. ⁠ .

Petrushevskaya expressed the same paradoxical thought in one of her poetic “parados”, published in 2007:

family
this is the place
where can
slap in the face for free

where you will be insulted
issuing it
for the truth

but where you will not be given out
where they will lay
will feed
caress
quench their thirst

heal and bury
and will visit
for Easter
and at least
twice

Boris Turkish. figurative series. 1965–1970 Museum ART4

Museum ART4

Boris Turkish. figurative series. 1965–1970 Museum ART4

Auction and Museum ART4 ⁠ of Russian realism, Petrushevskaya's texts bring together only common topics and characters, but hardly an artistic method, since there is no directly critical component in Petrushevskaya's prose. Due to naturalism and special accuracy in reproducing reality, her prose is also correlated with hyperrealism Hyperrealism is a trend in art of the second half of the 20th century that imitates photographic accuracy in depicting reality. ⁠ , but such a correlation, alas, narrows the Petrushevskaya method to one technique. Theater expert Viktor Gulchenko uses a less expected but more accurate reference to the aesthetics of neorealism, Italian post-war cinema, in which the everyday world of the urban poor is filmed with sympathy, compassion and minimal distance between the author and the characters. Petrushevskaya herself expressed herself in a similar way about her creative method: “Completely hide behind the characters, speak in their voices, do nothing to make it clear to the viewer who is good and who is bad, do not insist on anything at all, everyone is equally good, only life New Year in the Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital. 1988

answer Elena Makeenko

“As there are different weather and different times of the day, so there are different genres,” Petrushevskaya wrote in the preface to her autobiographical book “The Little Girl from the Metropol” (2006), a kind of guide and collection of keys to the “Petrushev text”. Ideally, it is worth compiling an idea of ​​​​the work of the writer according to this principle - collecting a complete picture from prose, dramaturgy, poetry and fairy tales. Thus, the topics important for Petrushevskaya and her creative method come out more clearly and more voluminously.

Among the stories, it is worth starting with one of the earliest and most famous - "Own Circle" (1988). A woman talks about a group of friends who gather at the same table on Fridays to drink and dance after a hard week. A stream of revelations, awkward questions, and witty misanthropy ends with a dramatic finale involving the seven-year-old son of the narrator. Painful relationships between children and parents is one of the main themes in the work of Petrushevskaya, but "Own Circle" reveals this topic from an atypical angle. In contrast to the same “Time is Night”, here it is shown how the callousness and alienation of the mother can be signs of sacrificial love. At the same time, it was “My Circle” that aroused indignation among many readers: they decided that this was an autobiographical story about how the writer hates and beats her child.

Acquaintance with Petrushevskaya the playwright - and many, such as Nikolai Kolyada, believe that she made a real revolution in dramaturgy - can be started with the play "Moscow Choir" (1984). This play is a social portrait of the capital at the beginning of the thaw, written with Chekhov's intonation; a mold of the time when everyone has to learn how to live somehow in a new way. Through a story about a family that simultaneously reunites, falls apart and shares a living space, not sparing each other's nerves, Petrushevskaya tells about the era of her childhood and youth, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. An important place in the play is occupied by another constant theme for the writer - the dehumanization that occurs with people who are forced to live together for years, in cramped conditions and, as a rule, in poverty. As one of the heroines of the Moscow Chorus pointedly says: “Everyone is placed in conditions by life,” and Petrushevskaya could have written this phrase on her literary coat of arms.

From the tragicomic everyday life, for which the texts of Petrushevskaya were long branded "dark", one step to a terrible fairy tale. “Number One, or In the Gardens of Other Possibilities” (2004) is a whole fairy tale novel in which the conditional post-Soviet reality, with the smell of poverty and a dangerous housing problem, acts only as a backdrop for an adventurous story with the transmigration of souls. Scientists, shamans, bandits and cannibals operate here, portals open to the sanctuary of the northern people, predict the future and resurrect the dead. In addition to the dashing plot in the novel, the writer's ability to mix styles and speech flows works at full capacity (for example, the inner speech of one character can noticeably split into two voices). New philosophical questions about religion, the golden age and the role of the media are unobtrusively added to the "family and everyday" topics. A rare abundance these days.

Well, the linguistic fairy tales "Bat Puski", inheriting the glorious kuzdra Academician Shcherba Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba (1880-1944) - linguist. Since 1916, he became a professor at the Department of Comparative Linguistics at St. Petersburg University, teaching there until 1941. Shcherba is one of the founders of the phoneme theory and the founder of the Leningrad phonological school. Studied questions of language norm, interaction of languages, delimitation of language and speech. Shcherba became the author of the phrase “Glokay kuzdra shteko budlanula bokra and kurdyache bokrenka”, illustrating the idea that the approximate meaning of words can be understood due to their morphology. ⁠ , fortunately, have long been included in the school curriculum.

bibliography

  • Ivanova A. Shops "Birch": paradoxes of consumption in the late USSR. Moscow: New Literary Review, 2017.
  • Ivanova N. Unsaid // Banner. 1993. No. 1.
  • Ivanova N. Secrets of deliberative rooms // Cinema Art. 2015. No. 7 // http://www.kinoart.ru/archive/2015/07/tajny-soveshchatelnykh-komnat
  • Kuzminsky B. Crazy Surikov. "Time is night" by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya // Nezavisimaya gazeta. 03/23/1992 // http://www.litkarta.ru/dossier/sumashedshii-surikov/dossier_4161/view_print/
  • Leiderman N., Lipovetsky M. Life after death, or New information about realism // New World. 1993. No. 7 // http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/1993/7/litkrit.html
  • Leiderman N., Lipovetsky M. Modern Russian Literature - 1950–90s. In 2 vols. M.: Academy, 2003.
  • Lipovetsky M. Tragedy and who knows what else // New World. 1994. No. 10 // http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/1994/10/knoboz01.html
  • Nyman A. Stories about Anna Akhmatova. Moscow: Fiction, 1989 // http://imwerden.de/pdf/naiman_rasskazy_o_anne_akhmatovoj_1989_text.pdf
  • Pakhomova S. "Encyclopedia of unculturedness" by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya // Star. 2005. No. 9 // http://magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2005/9/pa13-pr.html
  • Petrushevskaya L. Ninth volume. Moscow: Eksmo, 2003.
  • Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009.
  • Wall Josephine. The Minotaur in the Maze: Remarks on Lyudmila Petrushevskaya // World Literature Today: A Literatury Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma. Vol. 67. No. 1. 1993. P. 125–126.

All bibliography

Good evening, dear friends. In the yard "Time is night", 1992. “Time is Night” is not only the most famous story of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, although I, for example, much more love her novel “Number One”, which really is number one, it seems to me, in Russian social fiction, but it is also a diagnosis of the era. Indeed, the time has come for the night. After the euphoria of 1991, there was a time of poverty, confusion and, perhaps, depression.

We will talk about Petrushevskaya in two aspects: how she does it, and, in fact, why she does it. I never hid the fact that, although a significant part of Petrushevskaya's texts infuriates me ... In general, always when they beat me below the belt, even for my own good, it causes me a complex reaction. But at the same time, I frankly believe that Petrushevskaya is the best living Russian prose writer, and if once I had two solid candidates from Russia for the Nobel Prize, Iskander and Petrushevskaya, today he is left alone. Of course, the comparison of Petrushevskaya's work with Jelinek suggests that, of course, the Nobel is an unfair institution.

Petrushevskaya is a writer of bestial strength, such strength that even people who do not accept her in the spirit, makes them admire, treat her with an insane mixture of irritation and delight, I remember well my feelings from her texts. Even Alexander Tvardovsky, to whom she was completely across the soul, having read her story “Such a Girl, the Conscience of the World” in 1969, wrote: “Do not print. Don't lose contact with the author. Well, he did not happen to observe a powerful late age, Petrushevskaya as a prose writer was not published until 1991, so, conditionally, until the end of the eighties, when stories of the late sixties began to appear in Ogonyok.

And then she burst into Russian literature, she was known as a playwright, Arbuzov's studio, a person of exceptional and diverse talents: songs with a guitar, and poetry, and magnificent graphics and watercolors, and journalism, and criticism, of course, first-class dramaturgy. Although Petrushevskaya's dramas are only preparatory sketches, it seems to me, for her prose, but wonderful absurd plays, such as "Three Girls in Blue" or "Moscow Choir", or "Andante", you never know. All in all, I think about twenty pieces the highest class. But all this paled before the stories and novels that began to be widely published in the nineties.

How this is done, in general, is easy to understand. And when you get used to it and learn to imitate Petrushevskaya's intonation, and it is imitated amazingly easily, like everything stylistically bright, then the burn is not so strong. But at first, of course...

It's all one sentence: “But they were friends, Dunya and Alena, in childhood, we rested side by side in the Baltic states, and I, young, tanned, with my husband and children, and Masha and Dunya, and Masha was recovering from a cruel run after one person, had an abortion from him , and he stayed with his family, not giving up anything, neither from the fashion model Tomik, nor from the Leningrad Tusi, they were all known to Masha, and I added fuel to the fire: because I was also familiar with another woman from VGIK, who was glorious wide hips and the fact that she later got married, but a summons came to her house from the dermatovenerological dispensary that she had missed another infusion due to gonorrhea, and with this woman he broke out of the window of his Volga, and she, then still a student, she ran after the car and cried, then he threw an envelope out of the window to her, and in the envelope (she stopped to pick it up) there were dollars, but not a lot. He was a professor on Lenin's theme."

In one sentence, the whole life of a generation, here you have gonorrhea, and wide hips, and rest in the Baltic states, joint, and a professor on the Lenin theme, and we even see with amazing vivacity even the fashion model Tomik and Leningrad Tusya. Our life passed next to them, in this environment. Petrushevskaya, after the story "Own Circle", which appeared in the "New World" and made her a lasting fame as a major prose writer, printed things one stronger than the other.

As Mark Lipovetsky quite rightly notes, these works are always based on the acute, to the point of physiology and to the point of obscenity, the love of a mother for a child. In general, Petrushevskaya is very physiological, in “Time is Night” it is enough to recall this scene when a woman’s water breaks in a taxi, and right there a fly flies into these waters, and in brackets it is written - well, what to take, our bloody deeds. Of course, then many, well, for example, Alla Latynina, very accurately noticed that this is not a feature of life, but a feature of the author's gaze, sometimes you can look away, but Petrushevskaya's gaze is riveted to the terrible.

She is such an Andersen. Of course, she tells fairy tales, but these are terribly cruel, physiological Andersen fairy tales. Andersen's fairy tales are also terribly cruel, remember The Red Shoes. And yet she paints the rose bush all the time in her watercolors, and indeed Andersen is also very fond of the rose bush, because when it grows out of blood, pus and dung, it makes a huge, even stronger impression.

What cannot be taken away from Petrushevskaya is her amazing linguistic accuracy, especially in the dialogues, which is reflected in her powerful dramatic school. And, of course, what can I say, she remarkably feels the pain points of the reader, she really is an expert in striking precisely at these pain points. And this is always a lonely woman, always an unfortunate deceived mother and always a terrible predator man. Petrushevskaya's men are always physiological, and that's all. Firstly, they eat a lot, and I, who have a habit of reading while eating, am always terribly ashamed of this when I read Petrushevskaya, because my son eats a lot in The Time of Night, who has just been released from prison and now comes and eats mother: "eats my flesh, my blood, my black bread with herring." In general, it must be said that Petrushevskaya has very often physiological, nutritional, gastronomic associations. When she writes about a premature baby, she writes that he weighed there, three hundred grams, a pack of cottage cheese, and we still have this cottage cheese as the taste of this premature baby in our mouths. She knows how to combine two planes of being - physiological and gastronomic.

The man is rude all the time, cruel all the time, breaks up and throws dollars in an envelope, is at the same time an expert on the Leninist theme, that is, also a hypocrite. He takes everything from the woman, rapes her and devours her, and she continues to idolize him and looks at him with huge tragic eyes, like Anna Andrianovna, the main character-narrator in The Time of Night, such a poetess, a painful parody of Anna Akhmatova with her straight posture and with her pride, pride.

What is important about this? How she does it, of course, a great many parodies have already driven along Petrushevskaya with a tank. But the question of why she does this, this is really not a random question. The first intention that arises in the reader, the first guess that it is she who is taking revenge. Well, she has something to avenge, because she is in the preface to her just published book "Wanderings about Death", a book in which all boundaries have already been violated, all measures have been exceeded. For example, in the story “The Strict Grandmother” there is such an injection of horror, on the one hand, and unhappiness, on the other, that the first reaction is a desire to throw a book at the wall and never open it again. Well, you can’t just like that, when you don’t have enough keyboards, you can’t beat like that on the lid of the piano. But even in her other works, earlier, even more tactful, how she does this is understandable, but why? This is not only revenge for her and our desecrated life, in the preface that I mentioned, she writes that you can’t even imagine how I suffered at thirty, but how I suffered at eighteen, and only after 69 I didn’t care what will they think of me, I went to the stage, I sing, I am completely happy, guys, everything is ahead of you. This is also very petrushevsky.

Indeed, a woman like her can calm down only by achieving everything, “I have reached the highest power,” she usually lists her awards with some rapture, she is the most translated of Russian authors, in my opinion, and so it is officially recognized. Therefore, now she can afford to ease the pressure somewhat, but with all this she really takes revenge, only she does not take revenge for herself. She has a great monologue in the "Monologues" cycle - "And who will answer?". This is such a constant questioning speech to God, who does not exist, whom she feels with her Polish, Catholic roots, she has Polish blood, and she is always aware of this. By the way, she was originally called Dolores, that is, “suffering”, and then only she was renamed, was renamed Lyudmila.

Lyudmila Stefanovna is an incredible person acute feeling resentment against the world, but this resentment is high, humanistic. She really wants revenge, she wants an answer. And why? And who did that? And in the wonderful story "The Meaning of Life", which I would not advise anyone to read, even to a person with the strongest nerves, although there is a page and a half, after the publication of this story in "Syntax", I, frankly, for a long time swore off reading Petrushevskaya. But the question was asked there in the finale, so here's a puzzle about the meaning of life, if you like. She asks this question, this is the pathos of the Catholic question.

"Time to Night", of course, is a terrible condensation of details, although done with amazing art. Here, by the way, look at how she brilliantly stylizes fragments from a girl's diary, according to the fair remark of Mikhail Weller: “There are not so many writers in Russia who could describe a naked eighteen-year-old student in such a way as to cause readers not excitement, but horror.” But look here: “Please, no one ever read this diary, even after my death. Oh Lord, what a mess, what a mess I've sunk into, Lord, forgive me. I fell low. Yesterday I fell so terribly, I cried all morning. How scary when the morning comes, how hard it is to get up for the first time in my life from someone else's bed, dress in yesterday's underwear, I rolled up my underpants, just pulled on my tights and went to the bathroom. He even said "what are you ashamed of". What am I ashamed of. What seemed familiar yesterday, his pungent smell, his silky skin, his muscles, his swollen veins, his wool covered with drops of dew, his body of a beast, a baboon, a horse - all this in the morning became alien and repulsive after he said, that he apologizes, but at ten in the morning he will be busy, he must leave. I also said that I had to be at eleven in one place, oh shame, shame, I cried and ran to the bathroom and cried there. I was crying under the stream of the soul, washing, washing my body, which had become alien, as if I was watching it in a pornographic picture, my alien body, inside which some chemical reactions were going on, some kind of mucus was seething, everything was swollen, it hurt and burned, something was happening that had to be stopped, finished, crushed, otherwise I would have died.

My note(this is the mother's note) : what happened, we will see nine months later.

You see, the enormity of what is happening, it is being pumped from both sides. On the one hand, this is the horror, indeed, of female love, faced with disappointment, on the other, sorry, this is the horror of style, because this is written by an exalted fool, this is “the body of a beast, a baboon, a horse” and all this, sorry, banal betrayals . Alena is probably the most unpleasant heroine of “Time is Night”, because it’s because of her that Anna Andrianovna dies, in the end, she takes her children from her, that is, she takes her grandson, and this ends, in fact, the meaning her existence. Although this is a poor, painful existence, but she lives with these children, and physiologically adores them, there “the urine of a baby smells like calendula”, all this is endless, on the one hand, physiological, and on the other hand, endless sentimentality, docking together, they give wonderful effect. As one writer, whom I will not name, said, Petrushevskaya writes, like a German officer, precisely this combination of sentimentality and cruelty, when he can shoot ten people and then cry over a dog that has broken a leg, yes, that's it.

But at the same time, there are also terrible images in “The Time is Night”, after all, this is written by the poet, and the poet Anna Andrianovna, and the poet Petrushevskaya. There, behind the wall, is a neighbor who is always crushing bones, crushing them into bone meal to fertilize the site. And this clatter of crushed bones that constantly resounds behind the wall, as a symbol of such a background of life, is also about Petrushevskaya, because, according to Petrushevskaya, life crushes a person. And the only thing that can save him is mercy, and only on this mercy does she count. Yes, she beats the reader, beats without mercy, but she still beats pity out of him. Of course, very often this is hatred, if you are already a sensitive person. Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy once remarked remarkably about Leo Tolstoy: “I already understood, but the old man is beating everything.” You see, it’s really true, it’s the same here, I already understood, but why are you still beating me?

By the way, Kira Muratova, who loves Petrushevskaya so much and calls her the main writer today, and she is absolutely right, Muratova absolutely exactly said about her, not even about her, remember the beginning of the film “Melody for a barrel organ”, when two children, orphans, they ride in a frozen train, and in this train it turns on, the beggar turns on the tape recorder so that he gets more food, and this tape recorder sings: “Sleep, my son, sleep my dear bell.” After this prologue, I immediately said, guys, the beat will be long and painful. And for three hours, which “Melody for a barrel organ” lasts, they dunk us like this, and at the end there, above a child frozen on the street, like a soul, a balloon stands like this. Well, my mother is a woman! Here is a ball over a corpse - this is the whole aesthetics of Muratova and the whole aesthetics of Petrushevskaya. But after all, this is done so that we, having burned ourselves, regret it, so that we have at least some kind of sensitive point.

Of course, I put a much higher value on those texts in which Petrushevskaya invents, invents, in which she is a science fiction writer. For example, the brilliant story "Hygiene", I'm not afraid of this word, the best Russian story of the nineties. In general, Petrushevskaya is a great master of social anti-utopia, well, “New Robinsons”, when the whole family, waiting for what will begin, and we all understand what will begin, fled into the forest and lives there, harvesting mushrooms, and there are two old women, one completely survived from mind, and another storehouse of folk wisdom. Well, and “Hygiene”, when, in essence, an epidemic began, and the family began to prepare for it so much that, in general, they died from hygiene. One of the most terrible and nauseating physiological texts by Petrushevskaya, a terrible thing.

When she comes up with how she comes up with the transmigration of souls and the mysterious tribe of Ents in the novel "Number One", then, indeed, now I love you, now I praise you. But when she describes life, truly animal life, I think that this is too much. Okay, maybe this is too much for me, but it will make someone come to their senses, and, in general, you see, the nineties were the time of shock therapy. Two people were involved in it, Chubais in economics and Petrushevskaya in literature, both equally cruel. But I must tell you, they achieved something, they awakened in the people the ability to take care of themselves, because it became clear that there was no one else to take care of, and they awakened compassion, because without it the world would not survive.

In Petrushevskaya's fairy tale "The Clock", and she has quite a few fairy tales, after the mother and daughter reconciled, the daughter showed altruism there, there the sorceress says: "Well, at least this time the world remained intact." And in the nineties, he remained intact, and not least thanks to Petrushevskaya. Let's not forget that her main script is "The Tale of Fairy Tales", made by Norshtein, and in this script it is written: all the pictures that we show should add up like an accordion into one sound, into one word - "we live." And in general, oddly enough, Petrushevskaya's texts add up to this sound, therefore, strange as it may seem, paradoxical as it may seem, her black, hopeless "Time is Night" gives rise to a feeling of hope, with which we remain.

And next time we'll talk about a much more cheerful writer of this era, Viktor Pelevin, and his Blue Lantern collection.