From wandering the streets singing for alms like a young Edith Piaf, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya came to be one of Russia's greatest writers, recording the trials and wiles of everyday Russians with an inimitable combination of deep empathy and gallows humor. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prize-winning memor, she recounts a childhood of extreme deprivation, made more acute by the awareness that her family of Bolshevik intellectuals, now reduced to waiting in bread lines, only a few years earlier lived large across the street from the Kremlin, in the opulent Metropol Hotel.
For Petrushevskaya, childhood meant escape: from her aunt and grandmother who took her in after her mother left, from the boredom and toil of poverty, from the taunts of other children, and, eventually, from the overbearing decrees of teachers and supervisors. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing--squeezing into her uncle's room at the storied Metropol Hotel, feigning orphandom to beg in the streets, sharing a cot with her mother at the foot of a licentious family's bed--we see the origins of the wry perceptiveness that characterizes her work. Wise and emotional, yet never cloying, this is youth as seen through the eyes of a true artist of the people. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya)