There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby

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“Father” and “ Two Kingdoms ” first appeared in n + 1; “The Arm,” “Incident at Sokolniki,” and “A Mother’s Farewell” in Vice; and “The Fountain House” in The New Yorker. The stories in this collection were published in Russian in Novy Mir, Ogonyok, Literaturnaya Gazeta and other periodicals.

IN ONE OF THE SHORT MEMOIRS SHE’S WRITTEN OVER THE years, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya described a trip she took to Lithuania in 1973. Though part of the USSR, Lithuania was a troublesome republic-wealthier and more European than the rest of the empire, it was not a place a troublesome Soviet writer could go on official business. But Petrushevskaya wanted to make a pilgrimage to Thomas Mann’s summer home (on the Baltic coast) and also meet with a literary editor, who might not know-Vilnius was far from Moscow-that her writing was banned in Russia. She invented a reason to visit a Russian city near the border, then hitchhiked the rest of the way. The year before, Petrushevskaya’s first husband had died at the age of thirty-two after a long illness; for the last six years of his life he was paralyzed.

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