Grushenka: Three Times a Woman

Grushenka Pavlovsk

What an awful little book this is. And how rare it is to actually find any information on it. So pretty much everything in this review pertaining to the background of the novel is speculation (and mostly secondhand speculation from, erm, Brandon House scholars—yes, they do exist—at that. My apologies if any of this is horribly off the mark).

Grushenka purports to be the autobiography of a Russian peasant girl with a taste for S&M written at the turn of the century. And to the book's credit, Grushenka's rise to wealth and power does have the distinct odor of Horatio Alger about it, albeit with an underlying scent of leather. However, research has pointed to the book's actually being published for the first time in 1933 in New York in a private edition, a work of utter fiction (my, how surprising) written by B-movie mogul Val Lewton, producer of such classic films as the 1942 version of Cat People and the following year's I Walked with a Zombie. (Lewton did do some scriptwriting work under the name Carlos Keith, adapting Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Body Snatcher” and penning the Boris Karloff film Bedlam.)

And honestly, if the book really wasn't written by Lewton, it's worth a one-word review: crap. It's probably only worth one word anyway, but it's interesting to take the trail of a book written by a not-yet-famous individual, watch it go out of print during his fame, and see it not reprinted until over a decade after his death (the Brandon House edition was released in 1966, and to my knowledge has not seen a second printing since). I won't go so far as to say Jeremy Reed has written better erotica than this, but it certainly has nothing to compare to some of the more ribald works of, say, the mediocre William Kotzwinkle.

Gets * ½ simply because it's not as mind-numbingly boring as Rice's Sleeping Beauty novels or Reed's Sade's Sister trilogy.