An existentialist who conceives of human life as an unrelievedly punitive condition, Ludmila Petrushevskaya has produced a sizable body of fiction and drama that casts her tragic vision in a unique synthesis of sordid plots and sophisticated form. With minor exceptions, her work charts the daily psychic monstrosities of a spiritual wasteland populated by victims and victimizers bound by an endless chain of universal suffering and abuse. These Dostoevskian "lacerations," which transpire in a world devoid of God and hope for transcendence, are conveyed through the highly rhetorical, manipulative voice of Petrushevskaya's female narrators, whose strategic juggling of repression and expression constitutes her authorial signature. Despite her venturesome exploration of an impressively wide array of genres and fictional hybrids during the thirty-five years of her literary career, Petrushevskaya has not deviated from her essentially desolate perception of human life as purgatory.

Her work coheres into a single and...