Wearing black fishnet sleeves, jewels on every finger, and a feathered black hat with matching shawl, Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya looked like a character from her new book, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. On Tuesday, Sulzberger Parlor’s North Hall was filled with people who had come to hear her read stories like “The Arm,” about a man who digs up his dead wife to retrieve an airplane ticket from her grave; and “Pretty Woman,” in which a Julia Roberts-like character, awaiting her Richard Gere, grows fungus all over her body.

Characters in “The Fountain House” eat human heart sandwiches; in “Hygiene,” a little girl survives an epidemic despite kissing her diseased cat on the mouth. The audience in North Hall laughed the whole time she read these grim fables, in Russian. I don’t understand Russian, but hearing her pronounce “Richard Gere” and occasionally burst into Cabaret was funny enough.
Petrushevskaya’s dramatic reading reminded me a little of Eartha Kitt’s character, the evil witch Yzma, in Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove. Their clothing, too, was similar. She spluttered, her eyes got huge, and sometimes she just paused to stare and nod at the audience. Her English translator, Keith Gessen, was less theatrical and less Goth in a pink suit shirt. He averaged about fifteen “ums” per minute while translating aloud, but his call for audience participation in finding the right English synonyms made this less awkward and more fun.

Petrushevskaya discussed her own difficulties as a translator living in the Soviet Union. “The main thing for a translator is to find the music in the text,” she said. A text can be a masterpiece in its original language, but a bad translation will not reach readers. In one Polish novel she translated, the “only chapter she cared about” involved a dying boy whose mother was told that the only way she could save him was to carry him across nine bridges. The whole time they walked, to keep her from stopping, her husband whipped her with branches.

As a writer in Soviet Russia, Petrushevskaya did not publish her first book until 1988, when she was fifty years old. “I was a very strange debut author,” she said, now 71 and still very spry. In January 1991, three years after her debut, the KGB tried to throw her in prison for a letter she submitted to newspapers. The letter protested the Soviet Union’s sending troops to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, who had just declared their independence. “Dear Lithuanian Friends,” it said, “Please forgive us. The fascists from the Communist Party of the USSR, with their leader [Gorbachev], are trying to take over your land, because they know they’ll soon be forced to flee all lands.” After the letter was published in Moscow, the KGB harassed Petrushevskaya until the 24th of August, 1991, when Gorbachev was no longer Head of State and the Soviet Union had fallen apart.

“I always tell my students,” says Petrushevskaya, a teacher as well, “‘If you have a thought, write it down. They might not send another one.’” She also advises them to always keep “this LAP-TOP” on hand, pronouncing the word like she’s trying to hack up phlegm. “Write down strange things you hear people say, stories people tell you, strange thoughts that you have.”

“Who are your favorite poets?” asked one audience member. “Pushkin,” she said. “That is all.” She’s published more than fifty books—plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs. And she sews her own clothing, too. “For example, this hat,” she said, touching it, “which is called, ‘I was late for the Titanic.’”

Petrushevskaya’s stories are comically macabre and also beautiful. I left the event feeling like I had just met the sorceress Morgan le Fay or one of the Weird Sisters, in the best way possible. “There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales” is in stores now.