Widely considered as Russia’s best known living writer, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Scary Fairy Tales is a compilation of short stories based on her Russian books. Her writing was originally banned in the Soviet Union as it was considered to be too direct and forbidding. It was the fall of the Communist regime that led to her work getting the recognition it deserved, including being shortlisted for the Russian Booker prize in 1992.

This book is broken into four sections: Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems and Fairy Tales. Some of the stories are very short, i.e. less than a couple of pages, others are longer and more detailed. The length however has no impact on the effectiveness of her writing which is dark, mysterious, depressing and, at times, surreal. There is a clear focus throughout the majority of the stories on the female characters emphasising the hardships inflicted on women. The other common theme in this particular collection of stories is the departure of the human consciousness from reality, whether because of illness, accident or psychological reasons. A lot of the stories take place in this dreamlike ‘Orchards of unusual possibilities’ as Petrushevskaya named this state.

The stories are varied. Some are like ghost stories, others such as ‘Hygiene’ have an apocalyptic theme, telling the story of a highly contagious disease that is brought to the door of a family by a strange looking man whom the family does not believe when he tells them about the illness and how he has survived. Each member of the family slowly succumbs to the illness except the one child originally thought to be the first to go down with the illness who also turns out to have an immunity.

Psychosis also features with stories such as ‘The Black Coat’ about a woman on the edge of suicide who enters another dimension and is persuaded to step back from the noose. ‘The Miracle’ also features this strange dream-like state where a father desperately struggles to bring his daughter back to life. He succeeds, or does he? The great thing about the stories is they are mysterious and open to interpretation. In this ‘orchard of unusual possibilities’ anything is possible and the stories have no boundaries.

To pick one particular favourite in this great series of stories is virtually impossible. Some that immediately come to mind were ‘Incident at Sokolniki’ where a woman finds the body of her missing husband after he comes to tell her where is died. This was incredibly sad. ‘There’s someone in the house’ has a disturbing feel of a woman slowly descending into insanity and ‘Revenge’, the story the title of the book is based on, about a woman who tried to kill her neighbour’s baby perhaps leaves the reader with a false sense of what is to come with the rest of the book given it has a relatively happy outcome.

This is a great book with imaginative writing that is sad, distressing and harsh. I am sure some of this harshness comes from the environment Petrushevskaya wrote these books in. The tales span 30 years so some were written before the end of the Soviet Union when life was inevitably harder. I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed the short story format and I think this was mainly due to the nature of the stories. Some were so dark and depressing that I didn’t want them to go on any longer. It is certainly a book you want to put down, and dip into in stages, as each story needs reflection before embarking on the next.

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