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The Girl From the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia cover

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

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

0

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4

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The Girl from the Metropol Hotel was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel, 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, and 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 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 throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged.

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Publisher
Penguin
ISBN-13
9781101993514
Topics
Childhood in Stalinist RussiaSoviet history and communismSurvival and poverty

Other awarded books from Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has no other awarded or shortlisted books yet.

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