She was a wild child. She was an uncivilized street artist, a skinny little scamp and self-described "Mowgli." Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was a holy terror of a girl, fighting off starvation in the dismal streets of remote Kuibyshev, before moving on to the dingy slums and alleys of Moscow. She was starving in all the ways a human being can be - starving not only for food but also for knowledge, culture, beauty, love and acceptance.
"The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia," by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Ann Summers, is a true coming-of-age story in post-World War II Russia.
Estranged from her father since birth, Ludmilla is abandoned at the age of 5 by her mother for four years, left in the care of her maternal grandparents and an aunt. The young girl learns to scavenge and scrounge for her daily bread from an early age. Along the way, she gains street smarts and a talent for survival.
In the decade before her birth, Ludmilla's family suffered under Stalin's purges of the 1930s, losing family members who were there one moment only to vanish the next, never to return. In the years that followed, Ludmilla and her family are stigmatized by association, becoming social outcasts, exiles within their own country. They are banished from their apartment at the Metropol Hotel. Her grandfather loses his livelihood, and the family is destitute. Ostracized by their friends and neighbors, the family is forced to beg and scrounge in the streets. They become vulnerable to attack and are left unprotected by the Soviet police.
It is in this unforgiving world Ludmilla becomes one of the thousands of street urchins throughout Russia. Dirty, hungry, barefoot, lice-ridden, with only the clothes on her back, the young Ludmilla develops hidden talents to fend off starvation. Labeled a social pariah, she knows "appearances cannot reveal inner life," and her single purpose was only "to be like other children," the children with clean clothes, an education and friends.
Living in a communal apartment "full of books and bedbugs," this heart-rending story of one young person's victimization by a cruel, uncompromising state system reaches into the dark depths of the human soul, past the despair and gloom, to find beauty in brutality and grace in the midst of gruesome reality.
Kimberly Bolton is a circulation clerk at Missouri River Regional Library.