Of the 19 fairy tales in Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's slim volume, those that don't immediately slip into apocalyptic horror veer into blackest humour. "There once lived a woman who was so fat, she couldn't fit in a taxi, and when going into the subway she took up the whole width of the escalator," begins the tale of Marilena - who is not fat at all, but two whippet-thin dancing sisters, forced into one giant body by a vindictive magician. Then there is a story of a woman who had a tiny daughter whom she kept in a matchbox. Underneath the fantastic surface are slivers of truth: the abortion that came before the matchbox baby, the ambitions wrecked by that monster-magician, Stalin.

The idea of adapting the fairy tale for a modern context isn't new - but the results can be startling. Where Angela Carter squinted at Bluebeard with a feminist eye, Petrushevskaya crafts fresh horrors out of Soviet existence. What Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn did for Stalin's labour camps, Petrushevskaya does for the home front, uncovering ruthlessly suppressed tales of death, separation, loss and maddening loneliness. Yet even in her saddest stories, the concise beauty of her language whips her characters along to the point - magical, or realist, or macabre - that she intends them to reach.

Since Solzhenitsyn's death, Petrushevskaya has been regarded as Russia's greatest living author. Her life story is laden with as much suffering as any of these newly translated tales. She was born in 1938, at the height of the purges; her father abandoned the family and her mother had to place her in an orphanage. "By the time I was ten," she has said, "I felt I'd been through all the circles of hell." Reunited with her mother, she sought escape in the library as her grandfather went mad in their shared one-room flat.

Though she started writing early, her first collection was not published until 1987. "The New Robinson Crusoes" (included here), in which a family retreats into the forest to evade the state, appeared at the same time as the serialisation of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in the magazine Novy Mir. These stories whet the appetite for her novellas and the novel The Time: Night, her masterpiece. Petrushevskaya's long wait for recognition is almost over. l

Emily Hill is a reporter for the London Evening Standard