She began her career writing short stories and plays, which were often censored by the Soviet government,[1] and following perestroika, published a number of well-respected works of prose.

[1] She is best known for her plays, novels, including The Time: Night, and collections of short stories, notably There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby.

[2] She is considered one of Russia's premier living literary figures, having been compared in style to Anton Chekhov[2] and in influence to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

[3][6] Following this, Petrushevskaya recounts a harrowing early childhood spent in group homes, on the streets, and later in communal apartments.

[2][3][6] She states in The Girl from the Metropol Hotel that she earned the nickname "The Moscow Matchstick" from other children during this time, due to her thinness.

[5] She spent most of her early career until perestroika writing and putting on plays rather than novels and stories, as the censorship of theater was often in practice less strict than that of written work.

[citation needed] In an interview with the Financial Times, she recalls presenting an early work of prose to the prominent literary journal Novy Mir, and having it deemed too risky to publish: “They said they couldn’t protect me.

With her first collection of stories, Immortal Love, she "became a household name virtually overnight," and published in Novy Mir as she had not been able to only a couple of decades earlier.

[4] The first major translation of her work by an American publisher, the stories often contain mystical or allegorical elements which are used to illuminate bleak Soviet and post-Soviet living conditions.

An article in Dissent called the collection "a striking introduction to the author's work": "Petrushevskaya's stories could easily be read as bleak grotesques, populated by envious neighbors, selfish adolescents, and parents who overcompensate with exaggerated love.