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Tatyana Tolstaya (b. 1951) |
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Russian short-story writer, essayist, and novelist, who established her fame in the 1980s as one of the most original voices in Russian fiction. Tatyana Tolstaya writes of ordinary people, but her complex style is far from conventional, relying on impressionistic detail, colorful images, irony, exclamations, and multilayered narrative techniques. Her work has often been classified as a Russian example of magic realism, but she also draws on Gogolian realism and the literary avant-garde of Andrey Bely and Isaak Babel. "Russian writers and thinkers have often called the "Russian soul" female, contrasting it to the rational, clear, dry, active, well-defined soul of the Western man. The West, in fact, often refuses to speak about the "soul" at all, insofar as it applies to a people or a culture. The West refuses to use such an unscientific concept: you can't hold the "soul" in your hand, therefore it's impossible—and unnecessary—to study it. Logical categories are inapplicable to the soul. But Russian sensitivity, permeating the whole culture, doesn't want to use logic—logic is seen as dry and evil, logic comes from the devil. The most important thing is sensation, smell, emotion, tears, mist, dreams, and enigma." (in Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians, translated by Jamey Gambrell, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003, p. 6) Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg)
into a
literary family. On her father's side, she is the great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, her grandfather was the novelist Aleksei Tolstoy
and grandmother the poet Natalia Krandievskaya. Mikhail Lozinsky, her
maternal grandfather, produced definitive translations of Shakespeare,
Dante, and Lope de Vega. Her childhood home was filled with books which
stirred her imagination, but it was not until she was in her 30s, when
she began to write her own stories. "This
ability to daydream was passed on to me, although not to the same
extent," Tolstaya has said of her grandfather Aleksey in the story.
"I didn't start out a writer, and had no plans of becoming one.
Although I happily swam in imaginary expanses, I had no words to
describe them." ('20/20', in Aetherial Worlds: Stories, translated fron the Russian by Anya Migdal, Vintage Books, 2018, p. 4) Between
1968 and 1974, Tolstaya studied philology at Leningrad
State
University, receiving a degree in classical languages. While at the
university, Tolstaya met Andrei Lebedev; they married in 1974. Their
son,
Artemy Lebedev, became a web designer and later gained notoriety as an
outspoken blogger. In the early 1990s, Andrei Lebedev was a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore, and he has taught Greek philosophy at the
University of Crete in Rethymno. Ukrainian authorities have accused
Lebedev, a supporter of President Vladimir Putin, of justifying Russia's war against Ukraine. Moreover, he has denied
Russian war crimes in Bucha. Also Tolstaya favores the Russian side. Upon graduation Tolstaya moved to Moscow, where he worked as a junior editor in the Eastern Literature Division of Nauka publishing house. At the age of thirty-two, Tolstaya decided to become a full-time writer and began to contribute stories to Leningrad and Moscow journals. Except the works of Yuri Trifonov, Tolstaya did not appreciate much of the fiction that came out in the 1970s. "It seemed the better one got as a writer the harder it was to get published," she once said in an interwiev. 'Na zolotom kryltse sideli...' (1983, in Avrora), dedicated to her sister Aleksanda, marked Tolstaya's debut as a serious writer. 'Peters' (1986, which appeared in the prestigious literary
journal Novyi mir, eventually opened doors for her in the literary scene.
Originally entitled 'This Wonderful Life', the melancholic story told
of a nearsighted librarian, who loses his will to live a full life
after a disappointment in love. Until 1988, much of Tolstaya's fiction was
published in émigrré journals. Her first collection, Na
zolotom kryltse sideli (1987, On the Golden Porch), was delivered
from book kiosks and was sold out immediately. It was followed by Limpopo
(1991), a collection of novellas, which reflected the chaotic state of
Russian society during the glasnost period. Although Tolstaya's stories
did not include political details, the title work commented indirectly
on racism. White Walls (2007)
contained stories from On the Golden
Porch and Somnambula v tumane
(1992, Sleepwalker in a Fog), along with some previously uncollected
pieces. Tolstaya prefers third-person narration. In many stories, the
protagonist is a male – "soul's don't have a sex", Tolstaya has said. ('Tatjana Tolstaja', in Sata
makkaralaatua ja yksi idea, edited by Anna Ljungren and Kristina
Rotkirch, 2010, p. 161) Helena Goscilo has argued that in
stories such as 'Hunting the Wooly Mammoth' (1985), 'The Poet and the
Muse' (1986), and 'Fire and Dust' (1986) a large part of Tolstaya's
literary stratege was to capitalize gender stereotypes only to subvert
them. ('Monsters Monomanical, Marital, and
Medical. Tatiana Tolstaya's Regenerative Use of Gender Stereotypes' by
Helena Goscilo, in Sexuality and the
Body in Russian Culture, edited by Jane T. Costow, Stephanie
Sandler and Judith Vowles, 1993) In the 1980s and 1990s, Tolstaya spent much time in the United
States, where she took up residence with her husband, a classics
professor, and taught at a number of universities. After teaching
at Princeton University and at Skidmore College, returned back to
Moscow. Her journalistic articles have appeared in such periodicals as
the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, the New
Republic, and the Guardian.
The original texts were written in Russian and then translated into
English. In Russia Tolstaya has also co-hosted a popular TV show called "Школа злословия" (The School for Scandal); the show was broadcast from 2002 to 2014. "I am a person who likes to try different things in life," she had said. The American indie rock band Okkervil River has taken its name from one of her short stories published in White Walls (2007). With her niece Olga Prohorova, Tolstaya published in 2010 a children's book, The ABC of Pinocchio, a homage to Aleksei Tolstoy's Zolotoy klyuchik (1939). It was awarded at the XXIII Moscow International Book Fair. Many of Tolstaya's children's stories have elements from fairy tales, which have a transformative power when "disembodied heads frown and open their mouths" and "the world is so frightening and hostile". (in 'Loves Me, Loves Me Not', On the Golden Porch, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, p. 13) As an essayist Tolstaya has written on literature and on current events in Russia, her subjects ranging from Joseph Brodsky and Andrei Platonov to Russia’s resurrection and the prize of eggs. "It would be naive, if not silly, to think that Putin's policies can be influenced by accusing him in advance of all possible sins," Tolstaya said after Putin was elected president. "Now as never before there is a historic chance to carry out systemic reforms in Russia. It would be a great mistake not to try to make use of it." ('The Making of Mr. Putin', The New York Review of Books, May 25, 2000) Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and
Russians (2003) collected Tolstaya's pieces published mostly in The New York Review of Books
between 1990 and 2000. "Collectively, they become one of the great
political and cultural documents of our time," said Richard Eder in his review. (The
New York Times, January 26, 2003). Tolstaya's attacks against feminism and dismissal of "women's fiction" as a category have annoyed critics and liberal academics in the Unites States. Reviewing Francine du Plessix Gray's book Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope (1990), she maintained that Russian society is matriarchal: "To imagine that Russian women are subservient to men and that they must therefore struggle psychologically or otherwise to assert their individuality vis-à-vis men is, at the very least, naive." (Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians, p. 8) As a contrast to the everyday reality she had portryed in her
short stories, Tolstaya's first novel, The Slynx
(2000), was a dystopian fantasy of a world which is ruled by ignorance.
It won in 2001 the Triumph Prize, Russia's first independent award "for
outstanding achievement in the arts." Tolstaya started to write the novel in the beginning of the
glasnost and perestroika programs, and finished it 14 years later. With this
work, Tolstaya
joined those writers, among them Abram Tertz and Timur Kibirov, who
have attempted to challenge Pushkin's official image in the national
consciousness – in the story a member of the old intelligentsia
carves with a stone knife
an idol of the poet from a log, bit by bit. "He wrote a lot of poems, said Nikita
Ivanich, he thought the people's path to him would never be overgrown—but if you don't weed, then it's sure to grow over." (Ibid., translated by James Gambrell, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003, p. 136) The book was in
Russia a publishing event and sold well, but was received with mixed
reviews. The Slynx takes
place two hundred years after an unexplained catastrophic,
the Blast, possibly a nuclear Armageddon, has destoyed much of the
world. (Tolstaya has denied reference to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor
explosion that occured in 1986.) The
protagonist, Benedikt, is a young scribe in the service of plagiarism
industry, who loves books but only as objects, not as instruments of
knowledge and ideas. "You, O Book, my pure, shining precious, my golden
singing promise, my dream, a distant call—" (Ibid., p. 189) Two Russian writers feature as characters
in the
story, Pushkin and Sologub (Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov), the post-Blast Moscow's tyrant. Benedikt's friend Nikita Ivanovich is ordered to
be burnt at the stake, but he manages to survive with some other
dissidents the ensuing fire which gets out of control. "Ms. Tolstaya repeatedly makes the point that Benedikt and company are the ones who are the real animals," said Michiko Kakutani in his review of the book. "They are the Slynx of the title, a mythical beast, waiting in the forest to pounce on innocent victims; a destroyer of reason and a threat to freedom." (The New York Times, October 10, 2007) Eliot Borenstein has noted that Tolstaya subverts the traditional prometheanism; in her radioactive world being enlightened by old books may well be deadly. ('Dystopias and Catastrophe Tales after Chernobyl' by Eliot Borenstein, in Russian Literature Since 1991, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky, 2015, p. 95) For further reading: 'Sometimes Love: The New Prose of Tatyana Tolstaya' by Irina Surat, in Russian Studies in Literature, Volume 51, Number 3 (2015); Post-Soviet Women Writers and the National Imaginary, 1989-2009 by Oleksandra Ihor Shchur (dissertation; 2013); 'Tatyana Tolstaya. The Slynx: A Novel'; Tatyana Tostaya. Pushkin's Children: Writings on Russia and Russian' by Marta Dreyrup, in The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring, 2004); 'Recollecting Wondrous Moments: Father Pushkin, Mother Russia, and Intertextual Memory in Tatyana Tolstaya's "Night" and "Limpopo"' by Karen R. Smith, Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Volume 28, Issue 2 (2004); Russian Literature, 1995-2002: On the Threshold of the New Millennium by N.N. Shneidman (2004); Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos by Mark Lipovetsky, edited by Eliot Borenstein (1999); Reference Guide to Russian Literature, edited by Neil Cornwell (1998); TNT: The Explosive World of Tatyana N. Tolstaya's Fiction by Helena Goscilo (1996); 'Tolstaya, Tatiana (Nikitichina),' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby (1995); Russian Literature 1988-1994 by N.N. Shneidman (1995); 'Monsters Monomanical, Marital, and Medical. Tatiana Tolstaya's Regenerative Use of Gender Stereotypes' by Helena Goscilo, in Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, edited by Jane T. Costow, Stephanie Sandler and Judith Vowles (1993); 'Tat'iana Tolstaia's 'Dome of Many-Colored Glass' by Helena Goscilo, in Slavic Review, 42/2 (1988) Selected works:
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