The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

same arrogant, abject stream of consciousness: “I’m a hard harsh person, always with a smile on my full rosy lips and a sneer for everyone . . . I’m very smart. What I don’t understand just doesn’t exist.”17

There is this important difference, however. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is to such an extent a shade, an abstract philosophy, that his ailments, inner-organ complaints, and toothaches are all sensed to be metaphysical, which is to say,notsensedatall.Whenhetellsusthat“hethinks hisliverisdiseased”buthe’s not goingtodoctors– tohellwithdoctors–we appreciatethisinformationmore as an ideological position than a medical problem. The first- person narrator of “Our Crowd” does not just speak of disease but appears to be dying from it (probably some severe form of diabetes, as we learn in an offhand way): “in a single winter I’d lost both parents, with mother dying of the same kidney disease that some time ago had begun to show up in me and which starts with blindness” (p. 14). The plot of this story, punctuated by random violence and left unexplained to those who most need to know it (if their sympathy is to be aroused), is her attempt to find among her friends a surrogate mother for her soon-to- be-orphaned son.

Petrushevskaya’s universe is grim and unsentimental. It is also strongly anti-Tolstoyan, in its rejection of all benign, coordinating narrative authority and all hope for a spark or leap of communication between human beings. For reasons quite different from those of Evgeny Shvarts, she has a passion for the fairytale and haswritten several collections for adults. Inher handsit becomes a mechanical, faceless, morally blank genre. Her experimental plays, very popular in the 1970s, were produced by amateur student theatre groups before any official journal dared publish her prose (the Lenin Komsomol Theatre caused a sensation with Three Girls in Blue, her redo of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, in 1985). In Petrushevskaya’s anatomical materialism, bodies are not transfigured. They routinely vomit, urinate, sweat, and bleed. But these bodies are not mere

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vehicles for substance abuse or casual suffering; they are symbolic of damage done to the spirit.18

In Petrushevskaya’s most ambitious piece of prose, The Time: Night (1992), the depth of this damage is made clear, as is her status as “pessimistic relativist.” The Underground, a valueless dead end, is always pessimistic and relativistic. But being a woman and mother appears to worsen the conditions and raise the costs. The heroine of The Time: Night is a mediocre poet and hack journalist, Anna Adrianovna, who seeks an identity by surrounding herself with literary quotations. She worships her “namesake,” the great poet Anna Akhmatova, boasts of her girlish thinness (so like Akhmatova in her youth), and more than once hints at her desire to write herself into the suffering Mother at the Foot of the Cross that crowns the magnificent poetic cycle, “Requiem.” Her negative role models are taken from Tolstoy. As caregiver for her grandson Tima, dropped on her when her daughter’s shotgun marriage fell apart, she remarks:

Of course she [her daughter Alyona] never lets on who she’s living with or whether she’s got a man at all; all she does when she comes here is weep. It was Anna Karenina all over again, the lost mother reunited with her son – and me of course in the role of Karenin.19

Of Russia’s many reworked “Anna stories,” Anna Adrianovna is the most awful. If Chekhov in the 1890s had provided clinical and lyrical variants on the characters in Tolstoy’s great novel, pushing their plots up into the light of day, Petrushevskaya in the late Soviet period remains deep in the Underground. This feminized Underground is marked by certain features that Dostoevsky’s hero, or anti-hero, did not have to face. Apart from his brief contacts with Liza, the Underground Man hurts most of all himself – and Liza, after his final insult to her, will not come back. She understands that he has no capacity for sustained mutual relations of any sort. Underground women can hurt themselves too, of course, but given the range of their family duties (and cramped living quarters) in the Soviet context, usually they hurt others first, and far more effectively. These others are often children. And the adults come back.

Anna Adrianovna is matriarch of an apartment in which her entire dysfunctional family is “registered.” (In the Soviet era, the state provided its legally employed citizens with living quarters and regulated the square meters available to each resident.) Among those registered in this space are Anna’s mother (later moved to apsychiatric wardandthen to amentalhospital),herson Andrei (just back from two years in prison and still pursued by his criminal buddies), her daughter Alyona (who, after off-loading Tima, produces two more illegitimate children in the course of the novel). Petrushevskaya obscures chronology

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and events, providing few external markers to help orient the reader; the time is simply night, when Anna Adrianovna writes it all up. What never changes, however, regardless of season, is the lack of space, food, and privacy. Locks are always being changed, doors slammed or pried open, and sooner or later some mouth, usually male, will turn up and eat the fridge empty. Or steal money. Anna begs bread, soup, and candy from her hosts and employers to feed her grandson, neglecting (she tells us) her own needs. She considers herself a martyr and tries to win our support.

As always in an Underground, the speaking voice is defensive, boastful, consumed by self-hate fused with self-love, and embattled. But again our heroine differs from the resident of Dostoevsky’s parent text. The original Underground Man’s existence is static. Half of his “confession” is a recollection of events already many years past. The entire document is enclosed, closed off, with its crises already well rehearsed and stylized. This is one reason why a “philosophy” can be so easily extracted from the Notes. As so often is the case in Dostoevsky, life is used to illustrate an idea. Petrushevskaya gives us no abstract philosophy as such. Real people are still trying to live down there.

Of all the interactions in this stressed three-room apartment, the relation between mother and daughter is the most complexly double-voiced, allowing us some relief from Anna’s strident grip on the narrative. Lengthy direct dialogues and several embedded texts inspire our trust: Alyona’s na??ve diary of sexual initiation and subsequent humiliations, found and read by her mother who intersperses her own mocking comments, and then a strange entry written by Anna in the voice of her daughter (based on one of their hysterical exchanges). “That’s the scene I wrote,” Anna announces petulantly in her own voice; “fully self-critical, completely objective, though why on earth you might well ask” (p. 94). In some stretches of text, it is utterly unclear which side of Anna’s voice to believe; they seem to coexist in perfect, if hostile, balance. This situation is routine in Dostoevsky’s Underground, of course, where a single voice divides against itself. In Petrushevskaya, whole scenes divide, scrambling and compromising the speakers. Alyona has just called her mother, hinting that she’s very ill. Who will take care of her baby daughter, Alyona whimpers, now that another child is due to be born in two weeks (Anna didn’t know):

. . . what the whole conversation amounted to was this: Mummy, help me, hoist just one more burden on your back, you’ve always come to my rescue before, rescue me now – But daughter, I haven’t the strength to love yet another creature, I’d be betraying the boy, he couldn’t take it . . . – But what am I to do, Mum? – Nothing, I can’t do any more to help, I’ve given everything, my darling, all the money I have, my darling, my sunshine – I’m going to die, Mum, it’s terrible . . . (pp. 99–100)

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Dostoevsky’s Underground Man could never have sustained such piercing, other-directed utterances from another voice center. He saw to it that no one needed him.

In Anna’s accounts, especially her rewrites of the constant vicious family squabbling, she is the heroine and sole provider. Reasons to sympathize with her certainly exist, although undercut by her own self-importance and preemptive irony. Aspiring writers – we know this from Dostoevsky – cannot be trusted. It is interesting that Western critics of The Time: Night overwhelmingly distrust Anna and consider her abusive, dishonest, and manipulative, whereas Russian readings can be quite compassionate. In one 2005 guide to contemporary literature for high school students, Anna is classified as a tragic figure, an “aging, poverty-stricken poetess” burdened by a criminal son, a depraved daughter, a senile mother, a sick grandson, and here she is a