“How Long Can You Go Crushing Bones, I Ask You?”: The “Bad Mother” in Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s The Time: Night

When Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s novel The Time: Night ( Vremia noch’, 1992) appeared, it was treated by critics as a graphic, hyper-naturalistic depiction of the social condition typical for the period. However, recognizable socio-cultural everyday detail has radically changed since 1992, and nobody can be shocked anymore by a painful depiction of family horrors. Yet, the cultural relevance of Petrushevskaia’s novel remains intact. It is the rare Russian texts of the late 1980s-early 1990s that has survived the test of time, and whose significance did not fade away with the dawn of the glasnost -period euphoria.