The Question of Time, or a Quest for Virtues in Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s Fairy Tales

This chapter looks into a contemporary Russian writer Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s fairy tales and analyzes them through an approach to time. The tales under investigation depart from the fairy-tale magical thought to increase contact with everyday reality. The distressing existential strand merges in her works with the context-heavy realism of quotidian life in (post-Soviet) Russia, conjuring overwhelming hopelessness. However, this increase in references to the present occurs not necessarily to exclusively lament or criticize it but to engage with it. The present is for Petrushevskaia valuable, as it represents one’s own fragment of the universe, whereby the void may be filled up through meaningful intersubjectivity.