Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a Russian prose writer and playwright.

She was born on 26 May 1938 in Moscow into a family of office workers. She endured a difficult wartime childhood marked by near-starvation, wandered among relatives, and lived in an orphanage near Ufa. After the war she returned to Moscow and graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow University. She worked as a correspondent for Moscow newspapers, as an employee of publishing houses, and from 1972 as an editor at the Central Television Studio.

Petrushevskaya began writing poetry and scripts for student evenings early on, without seriously thinking about a literary career. The first published work by the author was the story “Across the Fields,” which appeared in the journal Avrora in 1972. From that time on, Petrushevskaya’s prose was not published for more than a decade. Her first plays, however, were noticed by amateur theaters: the play Music Lessons (1973) was staged by R. Viktyuk in 1979 at the theater-studio of the Moskvorechye House of Culture and was almost immediately banned (it was published only in 1983).

The production of Cinzano was mounted by the Gaudeamus theater in Lviv. Professional theaters began staging Petrushevskaya’s plays in the 1980s: the one-act play Love at the Taganka Theater, Columbine’s Apartment at Sovremennik, and Moscow Choir at the Moscow Art Theater. For a long time the writer had to work “for the desk drawer,” since editorial offices could not publish stories and plays about the “shadow sides of life.” She did not stop working, creating joke-plays (Andante, Columbine’s Apartment), dialogue-plays (A Glass of Water, Isolated Booth), and a monologue-play (Songs of the 20th Century, which gave its title to a collection of her dramatic works).

Petrushevskaya’s prose continues her dramatur