A Menininha do Hotel Metropol: minha infância na Rússia comunista

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Cecília Rosas (Translator)

Liudmila Petruchévskaia nasceu no Hotel Metropol, na mesma rua do Kremlin, sede do governo russo, em uma família de intelectuais bolcheviques que perderam grande parte de seu status social depois de 1917. Neste livro, a autora narra sua infância extremamente difícil: a constante falta de comida e aquecimento, os períodos passados na rua e as adversidades crescentes enfrentadas pela família.
À medida que ela desvenda sua criação itinerante, vemos, tanto em sua notável falta de autopiedade quanto nas fotografias ao longo do texto, seu instinto feroz e sua habilidade em dar voz a uma nação de sobreviventes. Um livro excepcional que fornece um vislumbre do dia a dia do regime comunista russo.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Russia, History, Biography, Biography Memoir, Audiobook

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Ludmilla Stefanovna Petrushevskaya (Russian: Людмила Петрушевская) is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright.

Her works include the novels The Time Night (1992) and The Number One, both short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize, and Immortal Love, a collection of short stories and monologues. Since the late 1980s her plays, stories and novels have been published in more than 30 languages. In 2003 she was awarded the Pushkin Prize in Russian literature by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Germany. She was awarded the Russian State Prize for arts (2004), the Stanislavsky Award (2005), and the Triumph Prize (2006).

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first an autobiographical slice-of-Soviet-life nightmare, but ultimately, a triumphant odyssey of a free human spirit! This is a highly, idiosyncratically PERSONAL story - which we read as a searing reminder of the awful victimization that ALWAYS goes on, somewhere in this decaying world.

It’s Always been like that! It’s like Stéphane Mallarme said, in an altogether different context, 150 years ago: “Sure, I know that History ALWAYS throws a rough blanket over all its Insolent Mysteries with a resounding thud...”

But THIS is about a defiantly honest little girl who refuses to be beaten. Against All Odds. And WINS...

Though she’s left totally to herself - abandoned amid the lunacy that is the wartime Stalinist machine - without her mother or her family, falling between the cracks of Communist normalcy, she lives to tell the tale.

Here’s a sample, from page 67:

"By (the end of WWII)… I had become an unmanageable, wild child, a real Mowgli. Today they would have called me asocial. In Kuibyshev (my relatives and I) had led the life of pariahs, untouchables. 'Enemies of the people' wasn't an empty phrase.

“We were enemies to everyone: to the police, to the janitors, to the passersby, to every resident of our courtyard, of any age… I didn't know what school or discipline was. I couldn't sit still; I read books at a fantastic speed crouching on the floor."
***

There is a very real, carefully hidden, FREAKY side of life. It’s full of weirdly jarring, chaotic happenstance. It’s a world where Tomorrow and Today and Yesterday have utterly no meaning. It’s the gateway to a quasi-meaningless Quantum experience of random disorder.

It’s the world of Falling Between the Cracks of Polite Society.

And THAT’s the world this anomalous little rapscallion now finds herself in.

And you know WHAT? She adapts to it PERFECTLY - without missing a beat.

I was never so lucky or adept to change... After Christmas in 1960, my parents checked me into the hospital to have my tonsils removed. A routine operation. Break a leg, kid!

I should have been lucky enough to be so unjinxed. Luck runs like a gold vein through most affluent middle-class families, doesn’t it? Nope - for while recuperating I had severe complications, even undergoing a tracheotomy to stop the bleeding.

In a random world very similar to that, no one knows for sure if Schrodinger’s Cat pulled through it all or not, and continued its space odyssey. But trust me, I got through my childish brush with a near-fatal absurdity.

Our adult life is only a makeshift containment of the Absurd. We improvise!

Welcome to Chaos. So it is with this little girl.

For suddenly, without warning, she was alone. Living in the greyly soulless trash-strewn streets of an Eastern Russian metropolis, ignored by the self-righteous and hated by her fellow envious homeless.

No family, no friends, no schoolmates. For years of near-starvation and scarcity. Until the day, without warning, when normalcy suddenly - and so quirkily - returned to her life!

Like I say - it’s an absurdly Quantum World.

And she survives it all.

Her wonderfully profound soul nearly intact. Scarred but not beaten. She becomes one of modern Russia’s greatest writers. A writer of true and rare genius.

And this book paints a clear and vivid picture of that very real, and very Messy Quantum World that is always SLIGHTLY BEYOND the precincts of our uniform, predictable, civilized minds.

It’s a scary memoir, but man oh man, is it GOOD!

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Left with her grandmother while her mother went to Moscow to finish her education, a very young Ludmilla, was sent to go through neighbors garbage. Potato peels meant food, cabbage leaves maybe a soup. She and other feral children would climb in the bread man's wagon while he
Was making a delivery and lick breadcrumbs from the wagon floor. She could not attend school as she had no shoes, and in summer she ran wild, sleeping where she could. She would not have her own bed, and this a cot, until she was seventeen.

This was life for her family in Stalin's Russia. Yet, this young woman, from this disadvantaged family would become one of Russia's more successful authors. This is her story, how she lived, what she did. The prose is relatively simple, without sentiment, occasional references to fairytales, or quotes from them. It always amazes me how someone rises to success after woeful beginnings and how some sink instead under the weight. Dwells little on Soviet political policies, it is rather a view of how many ordinary Russians lived under his dictatorship.

A powerful story, one that cries to be heard, effective because of the narrow scope and poignant
In the difficulties and hardships it presented. Photos are included. An admirable woman who not only survived but in later years thrived.

ARC from publisher.

[Esil · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. The Girl From the Metropol Hotel was not quite what I expected, but by the end of this short memoir I came to appreciate it for what it was. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, who was born in 1947 in the Soviet Union, recounts her life from birth up to her early 20s. She does so in the form of vignettes, focusing on different times and events in her life. What she describes is a ridiculously challenging childhood. The reasons for her difficulties are in large part due to the Soviet regime, but also due to her own family’s circumstances. The end result is that Petrushevskaya lived in abject poverty, didn’t go to school in her early years and had to fend for herself for much of her childhood. Despite these deprivations, Petrushevskaya went on to become a recognized author. What surprised me about this book was the tone. This is not told as a tale of woe, but in a very forthright manner sometimes veering into what feels like the adventures of a spirited imp. Petrushevskaya comes across as inherently unconventional, and always determined to survive and do things her own way. So while she describes really difficult circumstances, she does so with an air of defiance and triumphant. By the end, we learn that Petrushevskaya studied to become a journalist with a focus on humour, which helped me understand the tone of her memoir. In today’s North American parlance, she is the poster child for resilience. This is a short entertaining memoir. I listened to the audio, and the narrator used just the right tone to convey Petrushevskaya’s cheeky defiance.

[Dem · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an account of Ludmilla Petrushevaskaya's personal life and experiences growing up in Stalin's Communist Russia. A slim volume of only 149 pages that is unsentimental, vivid and interesting and you cant but help admiring Ludmilla Petrushevaskaya and her feisty personality.

Born in 1938 in Moscow's Metropol Hotel, the city's most famed residential building(also called the house of Soviets because its rooms were occupied by the old Bolsheviks). Born into a family of Bolshevik intellectuals deemed enemies of the people therefore a lot of her early childhood was spent on the streets foraging in neighbours garbage and living a wild child existence. With great feisty and determination she survived the hardships to become one of Russia's best living writers.

The book is translated by Anna Summers and I especially liked her introduction and the following passage.
. The child in her book like all children has been endowed with gifts from two fairies, an evil one and a kind one. The evil fairy a definite heavyweight, took away the child's home, her mother, her father, her clothes, her toys, her food, and her civil rights, leaving her without shoes in Wintertime. The kind fairy, doing what she could gave the child excellent health, mental resilience a hunger for beauty and culture an unerring ethical compass and an array of talents..

A well written and interesting glimpse of the author's life told in simple prose and accompanied with numerous photos depicting landmarks in Moscow and images of the author and her family.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive. So much is said in such a short book. The writing is strong, full of emotion and there is not a single wasted word.

This book is an autobiography, presented in the form of snapshots drawing important experiences in the author's life. Each "snapshot" is a short chapter. The telling moves forward chronologically. What is told of are those experiences that shaped Ludmilla. A pet, a circus performance, summer camp, a doll, as well as abodes, education (when it finally occurred), absence of parents and family deaths. All have importance. Important because they not only let us draw a picture of her life but also clearly eveal the author's personality. We start from her mother's impregnation on her 21st birthday followed by Ludmilla's birth in the Metropol Hotel nine month later (in 1938). We follow through to the fifties when she completed her five years of study in journalism, her travel to Kazakhstan and finally her first radio engagement.

Even from a young age her writing was recognized as being exceptional. It is her writing ability that makes this book shine. I will give one quote from the journey she made on the steppes of Kazakhstan:

There is nothing more beautiful than the steppe. Nothing. Even the ocean is smaller and ends sooner. For the rest of my days I will remember the sunrise over the steppe, a recently plowed purple earth and an orange sun trembling over the horizon like an enormous yolk.

Her career took off on the steppes at a socialist construction site. In her oral exam for journalism she stated that it is necessary to study life before writing about it. One chapter is about this exam. It is near the end and says so much about who she had become. The chapters before show vividly how her life experiences had shaped her.

Please read below, my comment at the halfway mark.

The audiobook is very well narrated by Anna Summers. The strength of the writing comes to the fore through the strength and clarity of the reading. In the beginning she reads too rapidly. Later she slows down.

********************************

Halfway through this very short book: I do very much like The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia. What is important to note is that word FROM in the title; she does NOT reside in the hotel very long. The book is not about the hotel. This doesn't bother me in the least. You get glimpses of a waif's existence. She is in reality an abandoned child surviving on her own during and after the Great Patriotic War. It is so very good because the author writes well. The author captures the essence of her childhood memories. No unnecessary words. What is there is gritty and real and grabs you.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938. The Girl from the Metropol Hotel is a short memoir of the time after her twenty-seven-year-old mother finished university and returned to her grandparents' house after four years away to bring Ludmilla back to Moscow. Ludmilla was on the streets by then, having ‘escaped’ the poverty of her grandparents’ upbringing in Kuybyshev.

On the street in Kuybyshev, Petrushevskaya took cold-eyed account of what she could sell to earn enough money to eat. She sang, and recited poetry. After one particularly moving rendition of one of Gogol’s short stories, a weeping woman in a large empty apartment offered her a green cardigan, which she took, a little perplexed, and not especially grateful. She wore it every day.

Petrushevskaya is said by some to be one of Russia’s greatest living writers. I had never heard of her. I always have some confusion in my own head about a repressive regime and the awards it grants: do the things a regime praises have the same currency out of country? In this case, I believe so, as she has been living outside of Russia for decades. It is said that in Russia Petrushevskaya was blacklisted in the 70s, was published in the 80s, and awarded in the 90s.

I think the citizenry must make their decision, and whomever is read and praised among the citizenry is a good choice for longevity of reputation, particularly in Russia. Russians have a brilliant literary tradition, including important satiric writers who were long-suppressed. Russians know all about the importance of language and how it can move one.

The same way Petrushevskaya looked upon her chances as a child on the streets is the kind of voice she uses in this memoir. She is matter-of-fact and does not at all curry our sympathies for a cold and hungry childhood. Everyone she knew was the same. There was no feeling sorry, just being more clever, more lucky, more resilient. To live by one’s wits requires keen attention, which must be how her writer’s eye developed. Whatever had value in a certain scene is something worth remembering.

Petrushevskaya is also known as a playwright, and there is a bit of a playwright’s multiplicity of voice in her memoir as well. She is able to see points of view and where they diverge, defining conflict. She has been writing from Eastern Europe and America since the 1990’s, though she recently began composing new lyrics for songs she likes and is singing on a cabaret circuit, that sometimes includes major venues like Moscow House of Music, around Russia.

Three books of stories have received wide acclaim, and The New Yorker published three. Her stories are said to be known for a fairytale quality, urban legend, or perhaps dark reports from a mystical, allegorical fantasy world. The books titles might give readers some idea of her grim realism: There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Killed Himself: Love Stories, and There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby , and her latest to be translated, There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In.

Moments of real pathos in this memoir are written (and spoken in the audio version) with no pathos. Like anyone who has experienced the trauma of revolution or war, if one manages to survive, one often just gets on with it—with the business of living. Not another second will be spent wasted by looking back and stemming one’s forward progress with regret.

The audio was narrated by Kate Mulgrew, produced by Penguin Random House. Anna Summers did the translation and has written an Introduction which gives readers some background, in case, like me, you’d never heard of Petrushevskaya. A short excerpt of the audio is posted on my blog.

[Olaf Gütte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mit erstaunlicher Leichtigkeit erzählt die Autorin vor allem
über die Schicksalsjahre ihrer Kindheit und Jugend im
stalinistischen Russland während des 2. Weltkrieges
und der Nachkriegszeit.

[Moonkiszt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read The Gentleman from Moscow and loved it, when Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's book showed up in a library scroll of new books available, this one called me over. What? That girl is a real one, and has written a book?! I'm on it.

While this girl is not exactly Amor Towles' girl, she certainly could be, validating (in my thinking) the possibility of both books -one of fiction and one a memoir. The Metropol Hotels sits in the middle of both, smug and silent, but somehow quietly pleased to received titled attention. In both stories the girls are fiesty and undeterred in their communications and connections. Both are very resourceful. Yet Amor's is cleaned up and adoptable for the reader public. Ludmilla's is resoundingly not. She is scrappy, ready to pick a fight, and mouthy. She'll do everything she needs to move along her path OUT of Moscow. She's not waiting for rescue.

A quick read spilling fiercely unadorned truth - she's not afraid of much, this author. I'll be looking for more of her books - I find seems she leans toward horror. . .hmmm. No wonder. Gotta admit: more bedbug mentions than I can ever remember in one read. It's a short read, with an abrupt end (she's too busy to keep on with this memoirish activity. clock is ticking. . . opportunities don't wait you know. . . )

The abrupt end of the read left me to my own devices as the audio conclusion announced our immediate parting. Was I going to be irritated or be ok with this sudden stop? My lips already registered my response to the interruption: slightly upturned, I was approving after all. Rather Mona Lisa, really.

Stars: Started with 3, but kicked in another for her spirit, and taking the time to write to us.

[Candleflame23 · Rating 5 out of 5]

.
.


ليودميلا بيتروشيفسكايا، الشاعرة والمسرحية والفنّانة التشكيلية المولودة سنة ‪1938‬. واحدة من الكتاب الروس
الأكثر شهرة وبحسب ماجاء في صحيفة( صوت ألترا
الإلكترونية )فإن هذه هي روايتها الأولى المنقولة إلى اللغة
العربية .

الرواية هي السيرة الذاتية لحياة الكاتبة نفسها ، هذه الصبية
عانت الكثير قبل أن تصل إلى هذا المجد الذي حققته ، نحن
نتحدث عن طفلة كانت تجد في حاوية الجيران عشاءها ،
طفلة تعرضت للحرمان من حنان الأم واهتمام الأب ، نتحدث
عن حياة في ملاجئ الأيتام ،نتحدث عن حلم بارتداء
معطف !.

خلال القراءة كنت أشعر بالملل من كثرة السرد وتفاصيل
شجرة العائلة ولكن مهلاً ماذا يمكن لذاكرة تلك الصبية أن
تحتوي غير كل هذا التفصيل في وصف معاناتها ، كان هذا
السؤال كفيل بطرد الملل عني ومواصلة الإصغاء لصوت
تلك الصبية .


لا أعرف إن كان من العدل فعلا وصف المعاناة التي سردتها
لنا الكاتبة بأنها رائعة ولكن يمكن وصف طموح هذه الصبية

وعزيمتها وإصرارها بالشيء العظيم .


ماذا بعد القراءة ؟

يوما عن يوم ازداد قناعة أن الماضي هو أكثر الأزمنة التصاقاً
بالإنسان .

#تمت
#أبجدية_فرح 5/5 🌸📚
#candleflame23bookreviews
#رواية #صبية_من_متروبول
#ليودميلا_بيتروشيفسكايا #دار_المدى للنشر والتوزيع

#كتاب_الشهر في #مبادرة_كتاب_في_يد_قارئ
#كتاب_في_يد_قارئ

#غرد_بإقتباس
#حي_على_القراءة
#ماذا_تقرأ #ماذا_تقتبس #القراءة_حياة
#القراءة #القراءة_حياة_أخرى_نعيشها

[Paula Hagar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could have been a great book, but I found it went all over the place and did not flow smoothly. Don't know if this is an effect of the translation or if it is the author's style of writing. But the events and Russian history portrayed in this little memoir were fascinating. I would love to see each of them described in more detail, and in a better writing style.

[Angelina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this small volume knowing next to nothing about the Russian writer & playwright L. Petrushevskaya but I’m glad that I stumbled on it. In less than 150 pages, in the form of short vignettes, she describes her childhood and teenage years, marked by hunger, extreme poverty and isolation. Her family on her mother’s side were old Bolshevik intellectuals, and as such were declared “enemies of the people”, many of them arrested and never seen again. During the war, she was evacuated to Kuibyshev (Samara) and stayed there for 4 years together with her grandmother and her aunt. They were ostracized (banished even from the common kitchen and bathroom) and mistreated but somehow managed to survive on meager rations of black bread (that never lasted for the whole month) and whatever food remains they found in their neighbor’s trash (potato peels and cabbage leaves). Ludmilla spent most of the time on the streets (often not returning to the room she shared with her grandmother and aunt for days), turning into a feral child – begging and performing, playing and fighting with other kids, searching for food and always barefoot. She couldn’t go to school because she didn’t have shoes and learned to read from newspapers she found discarded in the trash. During the winters, she spent a lot of time listening to her grandmother (who was ill and emaciated) reciting from memory Russian classics. After the war she moved back to Moscow with her mother but her life didn’t improve much. They were basically homeless and often had to live/sleep under the table in her grandfather’s room or in other even more dangerous places. She was often sent to different camps and boarding schools where she inevitably felt lonely and isolated despite her strong desire to belong. She describes herself as an “unmanageable, wild child”, who “didn’t know what school or discipline was”. Yet despite the incredible hardship and the fact she never was a good student, she was passionate about music, art and books, and later decided to study journalism. During these years she also developed her special story-telling ability that was clearly influenced by her life.
Petrushevska’s prose is spare, non-sentimental and she talks about her life matter-of-factly, never resorting to self-pity. ‘All in all, by the standards of the time I had a relatively normal childhood.” I’ve read enough about WWII and Stalinism to prepare myself for grimness and shocking injustice and while they were definitely there I will ultimately remember this short memoir as the difficult coming-of-age story of a girl with a strong spirit, wild imagination and love for freedom and beauty despite the darkness that was always close by.
* * * * *
'I was lucky. I wasn’t left behind in a sealed apartment, as often happened to the infants of the arrested.' (10)

'At that time it was common – people disappeared without a trace – like the character in Daniil Kharms’s famous poem about a man who walked out of his house and was never seen again. Later the poet himself vanished.' (19)

'Playground laws are worse than sharia.' (26)

‘A new life was beginning, and with it the great hunger of the post-war years.' (37)

‘My closest and dearest companion was a dog, Damka. We would roll around, I would hug her skinny neck, we would jump and chase each other, or I would throw her a stick.' (41)

‘I could tolerate hunger, but I couldn’t tolerate lack of freedom.' (44)

'Our usual position was in bed, Granny towering over my bone-thin body like a mountain – so swollen from hunger was she. We covered ourselves with every rag we owned, and for days on end she recited classics from memory, primarily Gogol - Dead Souls, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. She had one weakness: she lavished too much attention on the descriptions of meals and innocently inserted mysterious items like borscht and bacon. When she explained what they were, I salivated like Pavlov’s dog.
She also read Gogol’s “The Portrait" and Viy, which scares me to this day. “The Portrait”, a story of a young artist compelled by a mysterious portrait to sell his talent, left me dazzled. To this day I considered its subject, bartering one’s gift for the worldly glory, the most important among humanity’s collective tales.' (52-53)

There’s nothing more beautiful than the steppe. Nothing. Even the ocean is smaller and ends sooner. For the rest of my days I will remember the sunrise over the steppe: a recently plowed purple earth and an orange sun trembling over the horizon like an enormous egg yolk.' (144)

[Andrea Wahle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt so very disjointed. The "chapters" felt like stories she wanted to tell about her life, but they didn't seem connected to each other at all - and I usually like that style. Perhaps talking about herself in the first person in some chapters and using third person in others contributed to the feeling that they had little to do with another.
I was hoping for more about life in the Metropol Hotel itself (after reading A Gentleman in Moscow), but I did learn a lot about life in Russia during and after WW2. I can't imagine going through the trash of the other family in a communal apartment in order to make a soup from potato skins and fish bones.

I'm curious about her fairy tales and may hunt them down, but I'm not in a hurry to do so.
I received a free copy of this book in return for an honest review.

[Penny -Thecatladybooknook]

I don't remember how I found out about this book, but having read A Gentleman in Moscow recently, when the Metropol Hotel came up in the title, I jumped on this book. Just fyi...this has nothing to do with the book A Gentleman in Moscow other than the exact hotel.

The author of this book was born in the Metropol Hotel which was also known as the Second House of Soviets because its rooms were occupied by Old Bolsheviks, including her great-grandfather, her grandmother, mother and herself. Soon though their room is sealed and are left wandering and living elsewhere with others.

This was a very real, yet harsh, look at how people lived during that time. Petrushevskaya was perseverant and through her experiences we get a small taste of what it was like and how she was able to overcome the hardships she faced.

No rating.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this does explain some of those wonderful stories that Petrushevskaya writes.

Petrushevskaya's memoir is about her early years - her family's fall from grace, her birth, her life during war time. She lived as a half feral child for several years. But like in her stories, her use of language is beautiful and her comments on life searing.

"We ate glue in secret because of the rumor that it was flavored with real cherries" (22) she writes describing how scare food was, especially for her family with members imprisoned under the regime. It is so bad that at night, she is sent to the garbage pail in the kitchen to take the leavings left by the other family. One night she sees two dolls left by the garbage - her own dolls and horse were nothing really (her horse was made out of cardboard). She stares rapt - "Now, I know what a doll means to a girl: It is her tame goddess" she writes just before she reveals she had to leave these two goddesses.


The memoir is like her short fiction - magical, powerful, shocking, provoking, and a wonder.

[Fahad Alqurain · Rating 4 out of 5]

‏أحب هذي النوعية من الروايات اللي تؤرخ لحياة مدينة بأكملها. عن الحياة في موسكو منذ ما قبل الثورة البلشفية والحياة في الاتحاد السوفييتي الى الحياة في موسكو في هذا القرن.

‏هي قصة فتاة انهكها الجوع في الطرقات ولكنها كانت تقتات على أحلامها وتنسى كل شيء آخر.

رواية تحكي فيها المؤلفة سيرة حياتها ومعاناة طفولتها.

[N.L. Brisson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communal Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and translated by Anna Summers in 2017 caught my attention because I had read, not long ago, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, which was also set in post-revolutionary Russia in the Metropol Hotel, located in the heart of Moscow. While I enjoyed the novel by Towles, I felt that the life Alexander, once a member of the aristocracy, lived in the Metropol Hotel might be a somewhat romanticized version of the fate a person would normally have suffered as an enemy of the people during those early days of the Communist (Bolshevik)Revolution. The new leaders were purging the nation of old bourgeois influences and the privileged classes. Petrushevskaya’s story is quite different from Alexander’s and conforms more nearly to my understanding of the complicated and unpredictable suspicions that often led to the arrests of Russians in the wake of the revolution.

Anna Summers offers a preface which provides some background. She begins by describing a May 9th parade that took place in every town and village since the end of WWII with rows of ragged and neglected veterans marching proudly, and then she has us picture the day of May 9th in 2015 (Petrushevskaya originally published her book in Russia in 2006) when there were no WWII vets left to parade through the towns and villages; there were only pictures carried by their grandchildren. She tells us, “Except sometimes the facts of a family’s connection with the war weren’t suited for proud retelling and were therefore often concealed from the little ones who would then be forced to hem and haw and finally come up with some lie. Sometimes our grandparents didn’t just die gruesomely, buried alive in a tank, like mine or return disfigured or even return at all. Sometimes they were arrested and sent to the Gulag…” (Her father and her grandfather were killed in a mass execution in the late 1930’s, even though her relations were prominent Bolsheviks elevated by the October Revolution, so she had no war stories to tell and this was a problem.) “The shared experiences of their childhoods – evacuation, hunger – were heightened in her case by the unbearable – and unshareable – extreme because of the social stigma that branded her an ‘enemy of the people’”

Ludmilla’s childhood with her aunt and her grandmother was hungrier and dirtier than that of most children because of the classification and execution of her grandfather and her father. The female survivors were ostracized and interned in a prison without walls. Ludmilla’s story may begin when she was born in the Metropol Hotel but her life is lived far from Moscow for the most part. Whatever Russia was like after the Revolution for those who found favor with the Communists, Ludmilla’s memoir of her childhood years shows what life was like for everyone in a family once a progenitor became an enemy of the people, even though the reasons were often obscure, petty, or even imagined.

Soon this famous Russian writer, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, will join the ranks of those no longer living veterans of WWII. Thankfully she got to publish this memoir of her early hardscrabble existence and outcast state. We should not ever forget that the Russian Revolution was often an ideological quagmire with many victims, both guilty and innocent. Sounds grim, but is very readable.

[Terry Pearson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was pleased to receive an ARC from Penguin Books in exchange for my honest review. So, without further ado...

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is the New York Times Bestselling author of There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby. "One of Russia's Best living writers", she is the author of more than fifteen volumes of prose and is also a playwright. This is her memoir.

Ludmilla was born in 1938 inside the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, across the street from the Kremlin. It is the famed residential building that was the setting for "A Gentleman in Moscow." Today it is again a world class hotel. In 1941 her family fled Moscow in a cattle car for Kuibyshev. There they were treated lest than unfavorable. Life was brutal. There was little food or clothing and malnutrition ravaging their waif thin bodies; swollen abdomens, dark and sunken eyes, stick thin limbs. Ludmilla's job was to forage through the trashcans of neighbors for morsels of tossed out food long after the neighbors had gone to sleep. I imagine how difficult it had to be for a young child to find scraps of fat and tossed leafs and peels of vegetables and fight her temptation to eat it right then, as her belly roars with hunger, not sharing with others. In the wintertime the family had literary nights and her granny would recite classics to them from memory. After the war the family returned to Moscow where Ludmilla was sent off to summer camp because she had become a "wild child." Camp tamed her and she graduated High School despite her poor grades. Later she attended college and majored in journalism.

Ms. Petrushevskaya's writing in nothing less than lyrical. Her use of words allowed me to see through her eyes and feel her emotions, attend her journey though relentless days of hunger, of feeling the least bit of cold. Throughout the entire book you will find no mention of pity. She dealt with her situation for what it was, uncontrollable. That is highly admirable given that she was a mere child.

I really enjoyed this memoir; it had heart and soul.

[Debbie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really expected to like this book, but found got within the last twenty pages and just couldn't finish it. Perhaps something got lost in the translation, because I felt so detached from the author, the main character.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a wonderful memoir by a celebrated writer: Russia’s answer to Edward Gorey. The author’s survival story (and sense of humor) amidst Stalinist tragedy is inspiring.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

What was it like to grow up in Stalin's Russia if your family was singled out for trial and execution during the infamous purges? Ludmilla Petrushevskaya looks at her life in a series of short chapters and photographs from her very first memories to the beginning of her writing career.

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia is a collection of heart-wrenching and heart-warming stories of a childhood lived in poverty and persecution. The book consists of 32 short chapters, each detailing an incident or a person from young Ludmilla's life.

The courtyards of poor Russian apartment buildings were highly dangerous for young girls, with molestation or even rape being very common. The author frequently had to shout and run for dear life to avoid the leering boys:

The girls knew what had lain in store for me, somehow. Maybe they'd all shared a past in the caves, where their female ancestors were chased down and used. (How quickly can children regress to a primitive life, accept its simple truths! Common fire and women; collective meals shared equally; the leaders get more, the cweak get less or nothing. Sleep together on a filthy floor; grab food from a single pile; pass around a cigarette butt; not be digusted with others' fluids; dress in identical rags ...)

We also get a chance to see some of Ludmilla's favorite (and least favorite) teachers, especially Sanych, who was instrumental in turning her away from her formerly dismal academic habits.

Finally, we see the saucy young Ludmilla embarked on her career in journalism and writing. I could only hope that Ms. Petrushevskaya continues her autobiographical essays. The ones in this book are crisp and bright, and give clues to how to survive in a forbidding world.

[KWinks · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fascinating. Petrushevskaya turned what could be considered by some to be a nightmare of a childhood into a triumph, letting it shape her amazingly creative storytelling. She is an inspiration.

[Karyl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is an award-winning writer in Russia, but this is the first piece of hers I've ever read. As a child of the 1980s, the USSR fascinated and frightened me both, and I've read lots of things pertaining to that time period and place. This was probably the most unique piece.

This isn't a true memoir; it only covers Petrushevskaya's childhood up to her early 20s, and it's really a collection of vignettes to illustrate the difficulty of her life under the Communist regime. Even though everyone was supposed to be equal under Communism, Petrushevskaya's family were enemies of the state, and as such they were not entitled to even the bare necessities of life. Living with her mother under her grandfather's desk was the closest thing they had to a home. When she lived with her mother and aunt as a young child, food was potato peelings and garbage scrounged from the neighbors' trash bins. Petrushevskaya ran wild through the streets, as feral as a cat, until she was finally taken home to Moscow with her mother and sent to various schools and camps.

From this unusual and feral childhood, Petrushevskaya manages to make something of herself and becomes an award-winning author. She pulls no punches in this memoir but speaks almost with detachment of all the woes she endured at such a young age. She was too busy surviving to bemoan her fate.

This is definitely an interesting memoir, but without knowing more about Petrushevskaya, I felt I never really connected with her. Perhaps a fan of her writing will enjoy this memoir more.

[Caren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because it is on the short list for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for autobiography). I suppose I was a little disappointed in it. Her descriptions of the deprivations of living in the old Soviet Union didn't feel unusual. They are her own particular deprivations, of course, but it was a miserable time and place for most people then, especially those who were at odds with the regime. The book felt so disjointed, as though no chapter attached to any other. They seemed to be random memories. It had a Dickensian feel in that she was so poor, but so plucky. She really had to live by her wits. I wouldn't recommend it for younger kids, even though it is about a childhood. There are quite a few cases in which she saves herself, by her own intuitive instincts, from rape. Mostly, these accounts are somewhat veiled, but they are still pretty grim. There is an aura of menace around her and she often seems to be feral. I guess you'd have to be a bit wild to survive what she did. Not a pleasant read, I'd recommend it for those interested in the history of the old Soviet Union during and after World War II. (She was born in 1938, so was a child during the war.)

[Madhav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autobiographies are mostly dishonest and boring.
This book is neither. So it's not an autobiography. It's a book of short memoirs, sketches.
And it's stunning, beautiful writing.
I feel great having read two great books within the first month of 2021. The first was The Tunnel of Time by R K Laxman, and this is the 2nd. Incidently both are categorised as autobiographies, but that's no reason to shun them. They're great literary works and very easy to read. They provide ample emotional and intellectual engagement, and is such an engrossing read..
A great book for everybody!

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is a bit misleading. The amount of time the author spends living in the Metropol Hotel is small and insignificant compared to the rest of the places she lived in this books. That said, this is a memoir, not an autobiography, so there are lots of gaps and leaps in time. It's a fascinating look at what it was like to grow up in Russia during a time when few non-Russians had insight into the actually state of things. And the author must be a very special woman, to have survived and achieved so much after such a difficult childhood and youth.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat oddly written memoir (the author refers to herself alternately in the first and third persons in different sections of the book). A horrible, scathing childhood in the Soviet Union in the 1940s. The writing style is odd and not very idiomatic. Some of the stories of this gutsy girl are fabulous and frightening. A bad time to be an enemy of the state during Smiling Joe Stalin's purges. A pretty quick read. She's a creative rebel.

[Rod · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite authors and I devoured these glimpses into her childhood--clear, unsentimental, powerful--under extremely difficult circumstances. It is not a continuous narrative, but fragments, like shards of broken glass that, as pieces fit together, offer a glimpse of the author's reflection. An amazing sense of humor runs through it all that is impressive and inspiring.

[Alexia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book, but I couldn't. I found it disjointed and a bit confusing at times. Also, I felt it ended too soon. I'd love to read about what happened in her life after she graduated, and her journey to becoming an author.

[J.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

RAPT.

[Danielle]

If you hear someone's childhood called Dickensian, it likely stirs up all sorts of vivid images of hardship, poverty and even suffering. Certainly you would think of a colorful living circumstance, but not necessarily in the happiest sense. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's memoir The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia (translated from the Russian by Anna Summers) verges on the Dickensian. Her childhood was every bit as difficult as that of a poor orphan in Victorian England, yet she writes with such a lightness and matter-of-factness that you feel her suffering but she never asks for your pity, nor do you ever doubt that she is ultimately going to make a success of her life.

Petrushevskaya, who has published several story collections, presents her childhood as a series of vignettes that almost do read like short stories. Slices of her life growing up complete with photographs of places and people or drawings which give a sense of intimacy and familiarity even while depicting a life so very foreign from everything I have ever known save for glimpses into this closed world via the TV or a book perhaps.

The arrest and execution of family members of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, those relatives who took part as Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, set her on a trajectory of life quite different than most of her peers. She began life in relative comfort in the famed Metropol Hotel, but she ended up in a living situation worse than the worst.

"The shared experiences of their childhoods--evacuation, hunger--were heightened in her case to an unbearable--and unshareable--extreme because of the social stigma that branded her 'an enemy of the people'. That was the official status of Petrushevskaya's remaining family throughout childhood."

Russia is a nation that is proud of its soldiers, men and women, who fought for their country. It would not be uncommon even as a child for one to ask her what her grandpa did in the war (WWI) but she had no response. And later during the Second World War when a plane would fly overhead children would name family members who were fighting on the front. Humiliated, she could call out no one and would beg her aunt for names of some relative fighting. "She thought long and hard; all the men in our family had been shot or jailed, if you didn't count her consumptive father." In the end her aunt came up with two names, mining the dregs of far flung relatives.

Ludmilla was raised mostly by her aunt and grandmother. Her father left when she was very young and after the family evacuated Moscow for Kuibyshev during the war, her mother returned alone to finish her studies. Her mother was quite bookish and studied at the Literary Institute and Ludmilla recounts stories of her living, quite literally, under a table--just one small square in an apartment. Later Ludmilla would join her there where the bedbugs and lice would feast on her. By all accounts she led the life of a street urchin but really she took it all in stride.

"All in all, by the standards of the time I had a relatively normal childhood. Courtyard friendships; hide-and-seek; cops-and-robbers. When we weren't running around wildly, we buried 'treasures', placing shards of glass into a hold in the ground, covering them with a piece of clear glass, and piling some dirty courtyard sand on top."

As a young child she mostly skipped out on school, pretended to be an orphan begging or would sneak into the Officer's Club (as did other children) for food and warmth and once even was allowed to listen to a performance at the opera house in Kuibyshev. Eventually she would return to her mother in Moscow who was also trying to survive and finish her education, so Ludmilla would be carted off to summer camps or children's homes where she would rebel and cause problems and in the end be expelled. Her education was haphazard, but it was lack of effort and a bad situation, rather than a lack of intellect that was the cause of any failure. She was still well read and could get by in school and managed to graduate in the end.

The book ends with her finishing school and beginning work as a journalist working for the radio. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is a much admired and highly regarded writer in Russia and her work has garnered much acclaim. She has written books and plays, short stories but has also worked as a screenwriter, artist and in animation. I think she is only now becoming more familiar with English speaking audiences. I just realized that I even own one of her novels (one of those long sitting on the shelves books, The Time: Night, which I am now keen to try and track down on my shelves. I hope to read some of her short stories as well. Her memoir is wonderful. It sounds like it could read as a misery memoir, but it never felt heavy. It is a quick read, and my only quibble (not a quibble at all really) is that I wouldn't have minded knowing even more--more of her story, more details, what came after. Still, there is plenty yet to discover. Definitely a book to look for!