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
