The Black Butterfly

“The Black Butterfly” is a collection of masterful short prose by the most extravagant modern classic, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Not by chance was this status attached to her: like all the celebrated great writers of centuries past, Petrushevskaya explores huge themes of life, death, and love—wrapped in seemingly mundane everyday stories. Through this shell of material life, through the thick chorus of ordinary people and their ordinary problems, an inconvenient truth about human nature comes through in all its intricate, contradictory complexity.

But here is the catch: you won’t even have time to look around before the boundary between reality and unreality thins and disappears, and now the shadows of the dead take over authority in the world of the living. An hour after someone’s death, the deceased appears in a museum painting—and the black butterfly predicts a fatal fate. And how, then, should an ordinary person in an ordinary world deal with that?