Title: Маленькая девочка из «Метрополя»
First published: 2006
Description: "The prizewinning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age and finding her voice amid the hardships of Stalinist Russia. Like a young Edith Piaf, wandering the streets singing for alms, and like Oliver Twist, living by his wits, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up watchful and hungry, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation, made more acute by the awareness that her family of Bolshevik intellectuals, now reduced to waiting in bread lines, once lived large across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing--of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the kitchen 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 more than 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"--
Subjects: Authors, Russian, Biography, Friends and associates, Russian Authors, Russian Short stories, Social life and customs, Family, Coming of age, Communism, Hotel Metropol (Moscow,Russia), Childhood and youth, History, New York Times reviewed, Authors, biography, Moscow (russia), social life and customs, Communism, soviet union, Soviet union, history, 1925-1953, Soviet union, biography, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Personal Memoirs, Literary, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Hotel Metropol (Moscow, Russia), Social aspects, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary, HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union
Places: Moscow (Russia), Soviet Union
People: Li︠u︡dmila Petrushevskai︠a︡
Time periods: 20th century, 1925-1953