Portrait of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Birthday profile

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Russian author and playwright

Born
May 26, 1938
Age in 2026
88
Zodiac sign
Gemini
Birth year
1938

About Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya (Russian: Людмила Стефановна Петрушевская; born 26 May 1938) is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright. She began her career writing short stories and plays, which the Soviet government often censored and published several well-respected prose works following perestroika. She is best known for her plays, novels, The Time: Night, and collections of short stories, notably There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby. In 2017, she published a memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel. She is considered one of Russia's premier living literary figures, having been compared in style to Anton Chekhov and in influence to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Her works have won several accolades, including the Russian Booker Prize, the Pushkin Prize, and the World Fantasy Award. Her creative interests and successes are wide-ranging, as she is also a singer and has worked in film animation, screenwriting, and painting. With her first collection of stories, Immortal Love, she "became a household name virtually overnight," and was published in Novy Mir as she had been unable to do so only a couple of decades earlier. In 2003, she was awarded the Pushkin Prize in Russian literature by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Germany.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when Lyudmila Petrushevskaya was born

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya was born in 1938. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1938

  • #1 song"A-Tisket, A-Tasket" – Ella Fitzgerald
  • Top movieThe Adventures of Robin Hood
  • Best-selling bookRebecca – Daphne du Maurier

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentJoe Louis knocks out Max Schmeling in round 1
  • Top headlineWar of the Worlds broadcast causes nationwide panic
  • Technology milestoneNuclear fission discovered
  • Defining fadSuperman debuts in Action Comics #1
  • Notable inventionInstant coffee (Nescafé)
  • World population2.30 billion

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderFranklin D. Roosevelt
  • Sports championNew York Yankees (World Series)
  • U.S. population129.8M

1938 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19382026
Gas$0.20$3.45/gal
Average home$5,100$435,000
Average income$2,800$67,500
Minimum wage$0.25$7.25/hr (federal)
Movie ticket$0.25$11.95
Postage stamp$0.03$0.73
Population129.8M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Library of Congress. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.