"This book reveals in a terrifying and utterly authentic way how evil lurks within each of us. Under certain circumstances, evil can become uncontrollable, even all-consuming. It breaks free, deriving painful pleasure from immoral acts. This book also shows how fragile the boundary is between severity and mercy, hatred and love, genuine feeling and false sentiment." —— Olesya Sogrina, Librarian and Literary Critic

★ Ranked in the top positions of 5 authoritative book charts, a work with thousands of passionate reader reviews!
No. 8 on the 2025 "Most Popular Books Among Readers" Chart
No. 3 on the Monthly Modern Prose Chart
No. 4 on the Monthly Fiction Literature Chart
No. 5 on the Monthly Top 100 Books Chart
No. 6 on the Weekly Top 10 Books Chart
★ Shortlisted for the Lyceum Prize in 2023! Became a bestseller! The majority of the first print run sold out during pre-sales! Total circulation has exceeded 30,000 copies!
★ The novel tells the story of the twisted relationship between Grandma Zoya, an elderly woman forgotten by society in a rural village, and Kuprinka, a foundling she rescued from a garbage dump—a relationship marked by abuse, distorted love, pathological dependence, and intermittent remorse.
★ It begins like a fairy tale or pastoral mystery about an old woman and a spirit, gradually transforming into a mysterious suspense and thriller, horror and pervert novel, but is ultimately a tense and realistic drama of life. With the "mysterious presence in the wardrobe" as its core suspense, it blends rural horror with psychological suspense, creating escalating tension that grips the reader.
★ It raises complex and heavy themes such as trauma, painful obsessions, violence and forgiveness, and identity. It shows the reader the tragedy of how an "unfulfilled maternal instinct" can morph into a destructive force under conditions of extreme loneliness and social abandonment.
★ The reason this book stands as a literary discovery is not merely because it portrays cruelty, but because it does so with such precision, beauty, and heartbreak, revealing the universal and complex truth of human nature beneath that cruelty.

Grandma Zoya lived alone, yet she always baked pies on a schedule and every now and then stared at the wardrobe in her house.
She lived by herself in a lopsided, time-worn ancestral house in the countryside, kneading dough, telling stories, sometimes even pointing at the enormous wardrobe. Nobody loved Grandma Zoya, and what secret was she hiding? Perhaps under cover of night she cast spells, whispered prayers in corners, or wept bitterly for a life spent almost entirely alone? No one knew—not even her old cronies. The only certainty was that the wardrobe door she kept tightly locked let in not a single ray of light. Should any light dare to slip inside, her fierce gaze would strangle it at once.
Neighbours who occasionally went with her to the forest for mushrooms or berries suspected that their friend, unhinged by solitude, had come to believe a domestic spirit dwelt in the wardrobe. But there truly was a person inside—a dishevelled, mute creature who had never left the house, never once seen the sky.
The work leaves no reader indifferent. It tells of a village grandmother who adopts an infant a woman has thrown onto a rubbish heap. While the child is still a baby she rubs vodka on his lips and makes him sleep in the closet. When he grows she mistreats him—then, suddenly, begins to pity him, kissing and hugging him, begging forgiveness. The novel renders the atmosphere of the old woman’s rural life with almost unbearable precision: the tilting wooden wardrobe, the stack of old cast-iron pots, the ache of hauling water from a well so cold it stings like nettles until your fingers go numb. Every detail is so real you feel you are living it.
Grandma Zoya’s madness springs from an ultimate, structurally inflicted loneliness. The decay of the village, the erosion of human ties, the sense of personal futility—all conspire to breed evil. Her wardrobe imprisons the child, but it is also the emblem of her own self-imprisoned, lightless inner world.
Zoya’s figure echoes other cruel grandmothers in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Russian literature: Nina Antonovna in Pavel Sanayev’s Bury Me Behind the Baseboard, and Baba Vira in Sasha Nikolayenko’s Ant-God. Like Sanayev’s Nina Antonovna, Grandma Zoya is at once hysterical and taciturn, ruthless and merciful, feebly helpless and icily rational. Tracing the line further back, she resembles Kabanikha in Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Storm and Madame Prostakova in Denis Fonvizin’s The Minor—both absolute mistresses of their households who tyrannise their kin while keeping up respectable façades. Grandma Zoya inherits the tradition of the “domestic despotess” in Russian literature, yet she is granted a denser psychological and sociological dimension.
Grandma Said to Sit Quietly opens like a folktale about an old woman and a domovoi, then slides into mystery and thriller, yet in essence it is a harrowing domestic drama that confronts trauma, obsessional pain, violence and forgiveness, identity. Critics agree that its central theme is loneliness and the suffering it breeds. It is loneliness that drives Grandma Zoya to despair, to madness, to the awakening of her darkest self.

【About the author】
Anastasia Ryzhina (pen-name Nastasya Ryzhina) was born on 11 June 1990 in a small village of Chagodoshchensky District, Vologda Oblast. In 2012 she graduated from Vologda State University with a degree in journalism. That same year she and a teammate won the PolitPRpro political-communications contest and received an internship at a Moscow agency specialising in political PR. She stayed in Moscow, working in political consulting, as a PR manager and as a project manager in the restaurant business. In 2016 she won a federal grant to modernise a rural library in Chagodoshchensky District and used the money to renovate it.
She began writing prose as a student, but considers her serious turn to fiction to have come in her fifth university year, when an assignment demanded a short story free of journalistic clichés. The death of her father in 2019 became, in her words, a powerful catalyst for her writing. Since 2019 she has published stories in magazines and online platforms. She was a scholarship holder at the Lipki Young Writers Forum and took part in literary workshops, reaching the finals of several literary contests. In 2022 her poetry collection Leshy, Bring My Father Back reached the final of the Lyceum Prize and received the special Zolotoye Slovo (“Golden Word”) medal from the prize’s partner publisher Argumenty i Fakty.
In 2024 she debuted with the novel Grandma Said to Sit Quietly, released by a traditional publishing house. Later that year her second novel, Get Out!, appeared, and she began work on her third. Ryzhina has been hailed as one of the major discoveries of Russian literature in 2024 and the mid-2020s.