The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia

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Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography

The prizewinning memoir of some of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia
 
Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a circle of relatives of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, making a song for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far got rid of from the heights she would attain as an across the world celebrated author. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs all over the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors used to be forged.

“From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth possible. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is impossible to resist and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —Anna Summers, from the Introduction

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