It is an earthbound and frankly emotional novel, especially in a literary scene long dominated by the cerebral trickery of postmodernism. Ms. Chizhova is hoping that Russian artists are ready — finally — to address the good and evil of the Soviet past. Under Brezhnev, people averted their eyes from that past out of fear; under Vladimir V. Putin, she said, it was replaced by apathy. “For the vast majority of people, it simply is not interesting,” said Ms. Chizhova, 52, who smokes and talks with the energy of a coiled spring. “They do not have the feeling that history continues. It seems to them that in the 1990s, we just started over. As if we were all born then.”

But St. Petersburg is a city where blotting out history is difficult. Ms. Chizhova’s mother watched two brothers die of hunger while profiteers were taking fistfuls of gold jewelry in exchange for bread. Her father was forced into a detachment of irregular fighters who were sent against German tanks in groups of five, provided with only one rifle. Neither would have dreamed of explaining this to their daughter. But Ms. Chizhova’s great-grandmother was different; she turned over the memories absently, almost as if she was talking to herself. When Ms. Chizhova, then 5, recited a poem about cannibals in Africa, her great-grandmother explained matter-of-factly how the starving residents of Leningrad resorted to eating bodies.

“I would ask, ‘Where did they get it?’ ” Ms. Chizhova said. “For me it was like a fairy tale. She said some of them bought it in the market, thinking it was just meat. And then she would explain that when she worked in the hospital, they would store the bodies near the hospital gates, and by the time they went home in the evening, some of the soft parts were cut off.

“She would talk about that calmly,” she said. “And I heard it calmly.”

THOUGH the conversations stopped abruptly when Ms. Chizhova turned 6, they had already engraved something on her. When her teachers told her, “All Leningrad, like one person, stood in defense of the city,” her private thought was: It was a crime not to evacuate the children. And 40 years later, the insistent voices of old women began to declaim in Ms. Chizhova’s head, and she sat down to write a novel.

A slender 95 pages, told in a sometimes cryptic stream of conversation, “Time of Women” was not favored to win the Booker Prize, and some critics dripped contempt. Summing up the books of the year for the magazine Literaturnaya Rossiya, Kirill Ankudinov sneered at “literature sitting on grandmother’s trunk and becoming drunk on memories of how well people behaved under Brezhnev,” and Yevgeny Yermolin bemoaned the popularity of “cemetery erotica.”