Ludmila Petrushevskaya
Incident At Sokolniki
The "Songs of the Eastern Slavs" cycle was supposed to be a literary hoax. In the early 19th century, Mérimée put out an entire book called Songs of the Western Slavs, which the whole world (including Pushkin, who translated it) took to be a...
The Arm
During the war, a colonel received a letter from his wife. She missed him very much, it said, and would he please come visit because she's worried she will die without having seen him. The colonel immediately applied for leave, and as it happened that...
A Mother's Farewell
A young man named Oleg was left an orphan when his mother died. All he had left was his older sister, for though his father was still alive, he turned out not to be Oleg's real father. Oleg's real father, as he learned when he started going through his...
