The Girl From The Metropol Hotel Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Anna Summers Translation by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Anna Summers (translation) 9780143129974, 9781101993514, 014312997X, 1101993510 instant download after payment.

The prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people & 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 family 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, singing for alms, & living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. 

As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars & 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 & in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct & the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. 

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“From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous & lyrical account of the toughest childhood & youth imaginable. . . . 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 irresistible & so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags & riches of her memory.” — Anna Summers, from the Introduction