ABSTRACT
Between 1973 and 1986, or for approximately thirteen years of her working life as dramatist and prosaist, Liudmila Stefanova Petrushevskaia was effectively ostracized in publishing circles. This changed when she received widespread critical acclaim in 1985 for the story Our Circle followed by her nomination for the Russian Booker Prize for The Time is Night in 1992. She is now one of the most renowned living writers from the forties generation. Both her dramatic works and her prose fiction were characterized by a representation of peripheral and marginalized anti-heroes, presented in debased and unpalatable social conditions. Throughout her works Petrushevskaia presents us with varying models of the circulation of knowledge, focusing in particular upon the dynamics of these models and their effects on the microcosmic world of social and workplace relationships. These models are demonstrated in the thematics of her stories in a wide number of ways.
