ABSTRACT
Banned under Brezhnev, Ludmila Petrushevskaya's plays are disturbing. The force of her Songs of the Twentieth Century lies in the urgency of the cry it emits within the context of the 1980s. Following in the tradition of Gogol and Vampilov, she conducts her plots on the level of Soviet everyday life at its most banal, whilst contriving to create suspense and a sense of the uncanny in an extreme concentration of time and space. Her novels and plays are similar in that they both demand from their reader-spectator the most attentive hearing, for it is primarily through language that their hybrid characters are completely and subtly defined. The corruption and turgidity of the often breathless discourse, compressed by the violence of everyday life, reveal the disordered state of society and the degradation of human relationships between families, couples, generations and groups. Her work is a tragicomic dramaturgy which resounds with lucidity and cruelty, but also with the compassion that is still awaited from its producer.
