as food) is shared. Time- The novel is not chronological, but rather a series of anecdotes told by Anna. For example, stories of Alyona as a child, teenager, and mother are intermixed and often told without time markers. This makes it difficult for the reader to follow the action of the story or the plot, and adds to the growing sense of disorder as the novel progresses. Literary Significance Originally published in the dissident journal Novy Mir, The Time: Night entered the scene on the border between mainstream and dissident literature just after the demise of the Soviet Union. Critics have acclaimed it as both Petrushevskaya's strongest work and the standard mold for her distinctive voice. The Time: Night does typify Petrushevskaya's dark sense of humor and candid portrayal of gritty urban life in post-Soviet Moscow; "unforgiving verbal authenticity" is a defining quality of all Petrushevskaya's work. Petrushevskaya's narrative style being "fueled by rumor, gossip, and polemic," her work suffered harsh criticism during Perestroika, when cynicism began to lose its appeal among the literary elite. Similarly, the author's evenhanded portrayal of physiology in The Time: Night starkly contrasted traditional treatment of the issue in the early 1990s. Helen Goscilo frames Petrushevskaya's "presumably unmotivated frankness" concerning the body as a break from a "feminine" mode of expression particular to only a few modern Russian women writers. Petrushevskaya's chef d'oeuvre has since earned a reputation as a pillar of New Women's Prose, a genre of "bracing irreverence" and "complete lack of 'ladylike' squeamishness." Notably, however, Petrushevskaya does not take a particularly militant feminist stance, given the groundbreaking implications of The Time: Night. When prompted by an editor (before the publication of the novella) as to whether she sided with men or women, Petrushevskaya responded with "I'm on the side of the children.". Though her characters complain bitterly of Soviet and post-Soviet women's conditions, Petrushevskaya, nor New Women's Prose as a genre sprung from her work, minimizes "women's collusion in their own victimization." It might be concluded, then, that while Petrushevskaya introduced a blunt portrayal of contemporary Russian women's life in The Time: Night, her frankness is less a political tool than an empathetic gesture, though it took scholars years to identify that purpose. Explanation of Title In the beginning of the novel, The Time: Night, sometimes translated simply as Night Time, signifies the time of silence while Anna is surrounded by her