Women and Children First: Domestic Chaos and the Maternal Bond in the Drama of Liudmila Petrushevskaia

Abstract

Liudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaia is widely considered one of most powerful voices in Russian theatre today. Esteemed in her own country as the most prominent and complex figure in her generation of playwrights,1 Petrushevskaia enjoys critical acclaim abroad as well.2 Part of 1970s new wave of post-Vampilov dramatists that rose up to reclaim stuff of everyday as material stage, Petrushevskaia has already become a model in her own time for a new generation of young playwrights, who grew up distrusting ... established Soviet dramaturgical canon.* And as one of very few successful women dramatists living and working in Russia today, she brings a fresh perspective to bear on private problems of people their strained family relationships, their soured hopes and aspirations, their cramped living quarters. Where most modern playwrights pursue the image of 'magic land', visionary realm where self might find, if not fulfillment, at least shelter from assaults of existence,4 Petrushevskaia grounds this quest a haven from life's storms in grittier reality of communal housing. In effect, there is no such refuge; even family hearth is constantly divided and subdivided, continually engaged in a struggle existence (a condition described matter-offactly by one of her characters as life as a battlefield5). Home ceases to be a peaceful sanctuary due to overcrowding and bickering; whole generations grudgingly adapt to oppressive living conditions; and so begins disintegration of very institution of family, already manifest in statistics on rising divorce and declining birth rates in Russia. The reality of everyday