PG3485.E724Z4613

Introduction: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's War Anna Summers xi The Girl from the Metropol Hotel 1 Family Circumstances. The Vegers 5 The War 11 Kuibyshev 15 Kuibyshev. Survival Strategies 21 How I Was Rescued 25 The Durov Theatre 29 Searching for Food 31 Dolls 35 Victory Night 37 The Officers' Club 39 The Courtiers' Language 43 The Bolshoi Theatre 45 Down the Ladder 49 Literary Sleep-Ins 51 My Performances, Green Sweater 55 The Portrait 57 The Story of a Little Sailor 59 My New Life 63 The Metropol Hotel 67 Mumsy 71 Summer Camp 73 Chekhov Street. Grandpa Kolya 77 Trying to Fit In 81 Children's Home 85 I Want to Live! 91 Snowdrop 95 The Wild Berries 103 Gorilla 115 Dying Swan 121 Sanych 123 Foundling 133

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography The prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. “From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —Anna Summers, from the Introduction