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    The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia
    Unavailable
    The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia
    Unavailable
    The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia
    Audiobook3 hours

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

    Written by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

    Narrated by Kate Mulgrew

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The prizewinning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia

    Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel-the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles-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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 7, 2017
    ISBN9781524755560
    Unavailable
    The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia

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    Reviews for The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

    3.5/5

    18 ratings4 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      This felt so very disjointed. The "chapters" felt like stories she wanted to tell about her life, but they didn't seem connected to each other at all - and I usually like that style. Perhaps talking about herself in the first person in some chapters and using third person in others contributed to the feeling that they had little to do with another. I was hoping for more about life in the Metropol Hotel itself (after reading A Gentleman in Moscow), but I did learn a lot about life in Russia during and after WW2. I can't imagine going through the trash of the other family in a communal apartment in order to make a soup from potato skins and fish bones.I'm curious about her fairy tales and may hunt them down, but I'm not in a hurry to do so.
    • 4/5
      Left with her grandmother while her mother went to Moscow to finish her education, a very young Ludmilla, was sent to go through neighbors garbage. Potato peels meant food, cabbage leaves maybe a soup. She and other feral children would climb in the bread man's wagon while he Was making a delivery and lick breadcrumbs from the wagon floor. She could not attend school as she had no shoes, and in summer she ran wild, sleeping where she could. She would not have her own bed, and this a cot, until she was seventeen.This was life for her family in Stalin's Russia. Yet, this young woman, from this disadvantaged family would become one of Russia's more successful authors. This is her story, how she lived, what she did. The prose is relatively simple, without sentiment, occasional references to fairytales, or quotes from them. It always amazes me how someone rises to success after woeful beginnings and how some sink instead under the weight. Dwells little on Soviet political policies, it is rather a view of how many ordinary Russians lived under his dictatorship. A powerful story, one that cries to be heard, effective because of the narrow scope and poignant In the difficulties and hardships it presented. Photos are included. An admirable woman who not only survived but in later years thrived.ARC from publisher.
    • 3/5
      It was okay. I couldn't always follow her timeline. She talks about sleeping together with her mother for years but then is always off to various schools. The book really was pieced together at times like vague childhood memories. Granted this was a difficult childhood and it's great that she grew up to become an accomplished author.
    • 3/5
      Lyudmila Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 at the Metropol Hotel into a family of intellectuals. She did not live there long; some of her family were arrested and some executed as enemies of the people. This book is her coming of age memoir. It is told in a series of vignettes, showing her childhood of deprivation--eating from garbage cans, going without shoes in the winter, living outside in the summer. She tells her life as a child, through a child's eyes--very matter-of-fact, since it's the only life she knows, and thus it must be the norm. As a child's story, it is also not political. Recommended.3 stars