The Time: Night is a novella by Russian author Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright.The Moscow-born Petrushevskaya is regarded as one of Russia's most prominent contemporary writers, whose writing combines postmodernist trends with the psychological insights and parodic touches of writers such as...

. It was originally published in Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 in the literary journal Novy Mir

Novy Mir

Novy Mir is a Russian language literary magazine that has been published in Moscow since January 1925. It was supposed to be modelled on the popular pre-Soviet literary magazine Mir Bozhy , which was published from 1892 to 1906, and its follow-up, Sovremenny Mir , which was published 1906-1917...

in 1992 and translated into English by Sally Laird in 1994.

Plot Summary

Constructed of a manuscript written by the matriarchal Anna Andrianovna, The Time: Night is a first-person narration of her struggles as a single mother holding together a financially unstable and emotionally chaotic family. The opening pages reveal the shameless penny-pinching of her ex-convict son Andrei as he attempts to manipulate rental agreements to move into her shared condominium. Petrushevskaya also introduces Anna's daughter, Alyona, through a brief segment of her diary, unveiling her chronic promiscuity and destructive incompetence.

Characters

Anna Andriovna: Unsuccessful poet and narrator of the novella. Clinging to the Russian literary tradition of the self-sacrificing matriarch, Anna views her life as a grand epic. Her self-centered delusions strain her relationship with her family, especially her daughter, Alyona.
Alyona: Anna's daughter. Married multiple times and having multiple children, she is derided by her mother for her every action. Experts of Alyona's diary show a much more sympathetic character than the one portrayed by Anna.
Andrei: Anna's son. A troublemaker who often uses Anna for shelter and money.
Tima: Alyona's young son. Throughout most of the novella, is cared for by Anna, who dotes on him.
Granny: Anna's mother. Lives in a state home, but flashbacks highlight her uneasy relationship with her daughter.

Literary Significance

Originally published in Novy Mir

Novy Mir

Novy Mir is a Russian language literary magazine that has been published in Moscow since January 1925. It was supposed to be modelled on the popular pre-Soviet literary magazine Mir Bozhy , which was published from 1892 to 1906, and its follow-up, Sovremenny Mir , which was published 1906-1917...

, the Russian dissent journal famed for Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir . The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s, and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov...

, The Time: Night entered the scene on the border between mainstream and dissident literature just after the demise of the Soviet Union. The Time: Night typifies Petrushevskaya's dark sense of humor and candid portrayal of gritty urban life in post-Soviet Moscow. Such straightforward depiction of verbal atrocity and backstabbing between seemingly empathetic characters' against the sordid backdrop of lower-class Moscow marginalized her early writing. One reviewer describes the "unforgiving verbal authenticity" as a defining quality of all Petrushevskaya's work.

Publication History

Originally published in Russian in Novy Mir, No. 2, 1992. Copyright 1992 by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. First published in English in 1994 by Pantheon Books, New York, and Virago Press Limited, London. English translation copyright 1994 by Sally Laird. Reprinted 2000 by arrangement with Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

English Editions:
1994, United States of America, Pantheon Books, ISBN 9780679436164, Pub Date 23 August 1994
1994, United Kingdom, Virago Press, Limited, ISBN 978-1853817014, Pub Date 1994
2000, United States of America, Northwestern University Press, ISBN 9780810118003, Pub Date 11 October 2000