A Will & a Way

Glas New Russian Writing #13

by Natasha Perova, Maria Arbatova, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

The heroines range from a wide-eyed child to a 95-year-old sculptress in love with a man sixty years her junior, a noblewoman adrift in Moscow to an old lady forgotten in an abandoned village, from a gynaecologist to a fairytale princess... facing up to a world of illness, old age, death, madness, and men.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gem of a book. Each writer has their own style, but there was something beautifully disorienting, a resistance to clarity and being easily summed up, across all of the works. Maria Arbatova's "Equation with Two Knowns"and Larissa Miller's "Springtime in Broad Daylight" were devastating. Also, as a reader in the West, Nina Gabrielyan's story was extremely interesting for its commentary on class & ethnicity in Russia, told through the impressions of a small girl.