There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself

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Russians have a word, byt, from being, to denote the circumstances of everyday life. In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s love stories, byt means waiting in line for basic goods, from potatoes to winter shoes (“Young Berries”); it means inflation that robs old people of their savings (“A Happy Ending”); it means an ambulance that takes an hour to come to a dying woman (“Two Deities”); it means alcoholism, obsolete ideology, anti-Semitism, poverty, inhumane laws—all the follies and cruelties of late – and post-Soviet society.

Above all, byt means a shortage of housing. After the Russian Revolution, thousands of ruined peasants poured into Moscow. The state outlawed private ownership of housing, and so family apartments across the city were turned into rooms, which then were divided and subdivided until, eventually, there remained corners no larger than the size of one prone body, plus one suitcase. Over time these communal apartments were broken up, and families were moved into cramped, ghoulish blocks of apartments. By 1972, when Petrushevskaya published her first story, the city was ringed by concrete buildings made of one-, two-, and three-room apartments that often housed several generations of Russians. It is in these small, overcrowded, uniform, much-coveted units that Petrushevskaya’s love stories take place.

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