The ugliest book about women I’ve ever read One of my…
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The ugliest book about women I’ve ever read
One of my favorite Russian novels is Плач по красной суке (Lament for the Red Bitch) by Inga Petkevich. It’s also one of the ugliest books I’ve ever read.
There isn’t much of a conventional plot. The narrator works in an editorial office attached to a Soviet printing house, and much of the book is made up of the stories of the women around her: Klavka the Tank, Nelly “Direct Benefit,” Lyusya “Natural Disaster,” Allochka “Little Pike,” Var’ka the Bandit, Irma, and Yevgenia, their boss. The narrator herself is also one of the heroines because she drops ugly details of her own life throughout the novel.
These women are funny, pitiful and occasionally endearing. Generally, however, they are monstrously repulsive. They drink heavily and sleep with men whom they disdain. They use and abuse people. They neglect their families and hurt their loved ones. They bring personal drama into the office and make life difficult for everyone around them. They hate, love, and disdain one another, but they need one another to survive.
Despite all their flaws, I pity these women. Their stories are tragic because they never had a chance to live differently. Their lives and characters were mutilated by Soviet reality, aka “Sovdepia,” the red bitch.
Some scenes in the book are sickening. Klavka falls in love with a beautiful young woman and brings her to one of the drinking parties. The other women undress the girl to admire her body. Then they start chasing her around the table. The narrator intervenes just in time to save the girl from being raped by a bunch of drunk women.
In another scene, the narrator brings a boyfriend to a party. Her coworkers give her vodka, and she blacks out. When she comes to, he is with another woman. She drinks again, blacks out again, and wakes to find him with yet another coworker. Basically, her boyfriend had been passed around and used for sex. And he seemed proud of that.
This book is one of the most honest novels I’ve read about the sex lives of Soviet women. The heroines are promiscuous, but not in any “empowering” sense. Their promiscuity is a symptom of the mutilation Sovdepia inflicted on them. Soviet reality, as Inga Petkevich saw and described it, stripped people of their humanity and destroyed their ability to express or experience love through physical connection. To these women, sex was like vodka: consumed in large quantities to numb the mind to the bleakness of their lives.
Inga also writes about the sexual violence Soviet women were subjected to throughout their lives. Nearly every woman in the office, the narrator included, had been raped, sometimes multiple times. And they never recognized what had happened to them as rape. That’s how normalized it was.
There is so much ugliness in this book that just reading it makes me feel sick to my stomach. And yet, I keep returning to it because I fell in love with these women. They’re deeply flawed, but also funny, resilient, and endearing in a bittersweet kind of way. Petkevich writes about women with a brutal honesty I’ve rarely encountered. She doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of women, and I love her for that.
I’ll leave you with the opening paragraph of Inga Petkevich’s Russian Wikipedia article. I know you won’t miss the irony.
“Inga Grigoryevna Petkevich (December 9, 1935 – August 17, 2012) was a Soviet Russian writer and screenwriter. She is known as Andrei Bitov’s first wife and as the inspiration for female characters in some of his works.”
#entertainment
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One of my favorite Russian novels is Плач по красной суке (Lament for the Red Bitch) by Inga Petkevich. It’s also one of the ugliest books I’ve ever read.
There isn’t much of a conventional plot. The narrator works in an editorial office attached to a Soviet printing house, and much of the book is made up of the stories of the women around her: Klavka the Tank, Nelly “Direct Benefit,” Lyusya “Natural Disaster,” Allochka “Little Pike,” Var’ka the Bandit, Irma, and Yevgenia, their boss. The narrator herself is also one of the heroines because she drops ugly details of her own life throughout the novel.
These women are funny, pitiful and occasionally endearing. Generally, however, they are monstrously repulsive. They drink heavily and sleep with men whom they disdain. They use and abuse people. They neglect their families and hurt their loved ones. They bring personal drama into the office and make life difficult for everyone around them. They hate, love, and disdain one another, but they need one another to survive.
Despite all their flaws, I pity these women. Their stories are tragic because they never had a chance to live differently. Their lives and characters were mutilated by Soviet reality, aka “Sovdepia,” the red bitch.
Some scenes in the book are sickening. Klavka falls in love with a beautiful young woman and brings her to one of the drinking parties. The other women undress the girl to admire her body. Then they start chasing her around the table. The narrator intervenes just in time to save the girl from being raped by a bunch of drunk women.
In another scene, the narrator brings a boyfriend to a party. Her coworkers give her vodka, and she blacks out. When she comes to, he is with another woman. She drinks again, blacks out again, and wakes to find him with yet another coworker. Basically, her boyfriend had been passed around and used for sex. And he seemed proud of that.
This book is one of the most honest novels I’ve read about the sex lives of Soviet women. The heroines are promiscuous, but not in any “empowering” sense. Their promiscuity is a symptom of the mutilation Sovdepia inflicted on them. Soviet reality, as Inga Petkevich saw and described it, stripped people of their humanity and destroyed their ability to express or experience love through physical connection. To these women, sex was like vodka: consumed in large quantities to numb the mind to the bleakness of their lives.
Inga also writes about the sexual violence Soviet women were subjected to throughout their lives. Nearly every woman in the office, the narrator included, had been raped, sometimes multiple times. And they never recognized what had happened to them as rape. That’s how normalized it was.
There is so much ugliness in this book that just reading it makes me feel sick to my stomach. And yet, I keep returning to it because I fell in love with these women. They’re deeply flawed, but also funny, resilient, and endearing in a bittersweet kind of way. Petkevich writes about women with a brutal honesty I’ve rarely encountered. She doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of women, and I love her for that.
I’ll leave you with the opening paragraph of Inga Petkevich’s Russian Wikipedia article. I know you won’t miss the irony.
“Inga Grigoryevna Petkevich (December 9, 1935 – August 17, 2012) was a Soviet Russian writer and screenwriter. She is known as Andrei Bitov’s first wife and as the inspiration for female characters in some of his works.”
#entertainment
source
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