What can you remember from “The Brothers Karamazov”? Perhaps you recall the rampages of the drunken, leering father; the outraged pride of Katerina Ivanovna; the reeking wake of the saintly Father Zosima; or (the grad student’s choice) the speech of the Grand Inquisitor. The mind’s retention of plotlines, even those from the pillars of the literary canon, is often selective and uncertain. But here’s a different question: What can’t you forget? One paragraph has haunted English readers ever since Constance Garnett translated the novel from the Russian in 1912. Grushenka, a passionate “fallen woman,” tells the tale of a wicked peasant who dies and is dragged by devils into a lake of fire. The peasant’s guardian angel tries to save her by telling God of the single good deed the woman performed in her lifetime: she once pulled an onion from her garden and gave it to a beggar. “Take that onion then,” God replies, “hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold.” If the onion doesn’t break, God continues, “let her come to Paradise.” But as the angel draws the peasant out, other sinners cling to her, seeking their own rescue, and she selfishly kicks them away. The onion breaks, and down she sinks. Dostoyevsky didn’t invent this anecdote; a peasant told it to him. Lessons like this sometimes seem to emerge whole from the Russian soil, but not every writer has the instincts to grab on and hold tight when they surface. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya does.

Every one of the 19 stories in Petrushev­skaya’s “There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby” presents an arresting parable of this kind. Timeless and troubling, these “scary fairy tales” grapple with accidents of fate and weaknesses of human nature that exact a heavy penance. While each story seizes the imagination in its own manner, one called “Revenge” features a woman who could be the double of Grushenka’s spiteful peasant. Jealous of her neighbor in a communal apartment — an unmarried woman, like herself, whose pregnancy has disrupted their friendship — she booby-­traps their common space with boxes of needles and buckets of bleach and boiling water, hoping an accident will befall the unsuspecting mother’s young child. Will the woman succeed in her cruel plan — and, if so, will she be punished? How can justice be served on an unprovable crime? Petrushevskaya has both the answer and the judgment.

Short, highly concentrated, inventive and disturbing, her tales inhabit a border­line between this world and the next, a place where vengeance and grace may be achieved only in dreams. The editor and critic Keith Gessen (author of the novel “All the Sad Young Literary Men”) and Anna Summers, a Boston-based scholar of Slavic literature, chose and translated these selections, winnowing them from the large harvest of Petrushevskaya’s works and hand-picking stories with mystical resonance or echoes in fable and fairy tale. In their introduction, they explain that the origins of this genre reach back to Homer, to the ritual that classicists call nekyia, communion with the dead. But there’s no need to consult the “Odyssey” to understand the author’s method — M. Night Shyamalan’s film “The Sixth Sense” will also summon the appropriate shiver. In one of her collections, Gessen and Summers write, “Petrushevskaya invented a name for this secondary reality: ‘Orchards of Unusual Possibilities.’ ” They are orchards you would not want to visit by night.