The subject of the thesis is a detailed analysis of the social aspect of characters in Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s short novel Our Crowd. The first part of the paper presents the socio-historical context of the USSR and technical characteristics of Petrushevskaya’s style, while the second part focuses on the analysis of the characters. With a specific “natural style” which successfully opposes hopelessness to hope, and portrays ugliness within and around people through the grotesque, Petrushevskaya is constantly combining “laughter and tears” which earned her the title of chernuha’s representative. The laughter/tears combination in her oeuvre attracts a shock-ready audience, successfully achieving her main goal to provoke “catharsis” within the reader. She lightens the “cruel realism” by using the grotesque, thus producing caricatured personalities, sort of alter-egos of Russian classic heroes. Her protagonists are alienated and lonely women living an ordinary, boring life based on absurdity and contradiction. The heroine of Our crowd represents her group of friends made up of dysfunctional individuals connected by unhealthy relationships and habits, reconciled with ordinary life without pretensions. They are personas who, under Petrushevskaya’s pen, become mere grotesque, passive puppets who quietly accept all life's adversities. Timeless narration, digressions, interrupted sentences, unreliable narrator, contradictions, short “one breath” sentences... Reading of Petrushevskaya’s oeuvre presents an unforgettable experience which requires a reader’s full focus from the first to the last second.