=book recently read: There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya=

A selection of short stories selected from the oeuvre of a Russian woman now nearly eighty, this particular batch of tales deal with love, romance, obsession, emotional need, sex, and the general morass of human dysfunction resulting therefrom. Ludmilla P-etc. is compared to a whole slew of writers on the cover of this book betraying the sad fact that here in America we don't know how to market writing like hers—which is to say writing with soul, political and social conscious, a sense of history, and human universality. This sort of writing is a tradition in a land that has produced writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol. Like those guys Ludmilla P writers with a mix of gritty realism, black humor, and what I can best describe as a sort of oracular fabulism. 

It is the folkloric quality to these tales that give them their age-old sensibility and wisdom. This is a quality that can't be faked. It must come from the very soil of a place, the collective wisdom of a people in touch with the truths of human nature in all its forms, in all its sufferings and exaltation, elemental truths that have always existed and will always exist. America, by contrast, is a young culture and seems only to be growing more immature and superficial as time goes by. Will America ever produce the equal of a Dostoyevsky, or even a Dickens? 

Ludmilla P's stories are situated somewhere between dreaming and waking, myth and everyday reality; they bear witness to the truth that you cannot have only one or the other if you want to convey what it truly feels like to be a human being. These stories take their particularity in the Soviet experience of privation, overcrowding, rationing of food, shelter, clothing, of inept bureaucracy, poverty, and endemic corruption but they attain their universality in the sense that lives everywhere partake, if not literally, then metaphorically of privation, of want, needs, desires and dreams that go unfulfilled. 

That's not to say that these stories are all gloom and doom because they are just the opposite. They are full of an often grotesque, desperate resilience that brings out the best of human nature even at it's worse, it's grandeur at the depth of squalor. For the most part, all the stories have a "happy" ending albeit a compromised and unconventional happiness as the folks that people Ludmilla P's fiction get what they want if often in forms they least expect, or even recognize. It's this quality of the everyday magic of life that gives her "fairy tales" their realistic bite and real life its enchanted fairytale quality.