Tatyana Tolstaya
![]() | You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (July 2018) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
|
Tatyana Tolstaya | |
---|---|
![]() 2008 | |
Born | Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya 3 May 1951 Leningrad, USSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russia) |
Occupation | Writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, essayist |
Alma mater | Saint Petersburg State University |
Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya (Russian: Татья́на Ники́тична Толста́я; born 3 May 1951) is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family, known for her fiction and "acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life".[1]
Family
Tolstaya was born in Leningrad into a family of writers. Her paternal grandfather, Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, was a pioneering science fiction writer, and the son of Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoy (1849–1900) and Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva (1854–1906), a relative of Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev and the writer Ivan Turgenev. Tolstaya's paternal grandmother was the poet Natalia Krandievskaya. Mikhail Lozinsky (1886-1955), her maternal grandfather, was a literary translator renowned for his translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy. Tolstaya's sister, Natalia was a writer as well. Her son, Artemy Lebedev, is the founder-owner of Art. Lebedev Studio, a Russian web design firm.[2]
Life and work
Tolstaya received her education at the department of classical philology of the Leningrad State University. She moved to Moscow in the early 1980s and started working in the Nauka publishing house.[citation needed]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Master_Poets_Remember_Brodsky.gif/300px-Master_Poets_Remember_Brodsky.gif)
Her first short story, "On the Golden Porch" (На золотом крыльце сидели), appeared in Avrora magazine in 1983 and marked the start of Tolstaya's literary career, and her story collection of the same name established Tolstaya as one of the foremost writers of the perestroika and post-Soviet period. As Michiko Kakutani writes, "one can find echoes...of her great-granduncle Leo Tolstoy's work - his love of nature, his psychological insight, his attention to the details of everyday life".[3] But "her luminous, haunting stories most insistently recall the work of Chekhov, mapping characters' inner lives and unfulfilled dreams with uncommon sympathy and insight", and also display "the author's Nabokovian love of language and her affinity for strange excursions into the surreal, reminiscent of Bulgakov and Gogol." [4]
She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities.[5] Her novel The Slynx (Кысь Kys, 2000) is a dystopian vision of post-nuclear Russian life in what was once (now forgotten) Moscow, presenting a negative Bildungsroman that in part confronts "disappointments of post-Soviet Russian political and social life".[6] It has been described as "an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia’s past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now".[7] For the twelve years between 2002 and 2014, Tolstaya co-hosted a Russian cultural television programme, The School for Scandal (Школа злословия, named after play by Richard Sheridan), on which she conducted interviews with diverse representatives of contemporary Russian culture and politics.[8]
Bibliography
Books translated into English
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (1989). On the golden porch. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Knopf.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (1990) [1989]. On the golden porch. Reprint. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. New York: Vintage.
{{cite book}}
: Unknown parameter|authormask=
ignored (|author-mask=
suggested) (help) - Tolstaya, Tatyana (1990) [1989]. On the golden porch and other stories. Reprint. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. Penguin.
{{cite book}}
: Unknown parameter|authormask=
ignored (|author-mask=
suggested) (help) - Sleepwalker in a Fog, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1991, then Vintage Books, 1993; ISBN 0-679-73063-X
- Pushkin's Children: Writings on Russia and Russians. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. 2003. Retrieved 25 March 2017.
- The Slynx. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. 2003. Retrieved 24 March 2017.
- White Walls. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. 2007. Retrieved 24 March 2017.
- Aetherial Worlds: Stories. New York: Knopf. 2018. ISBN 978-1524732776. Retrieved 12 October 2018.
Selected shorter fiction
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (8 January 1990). "The Poet and the Muse". Fiction. The New Yorker.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (8 October 1990). "Heavenly Flame". Fiction. The New Yorker. Translated by Jamey Gambrell.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (4 March 1991). "Most Beloved". Fiction. The New Yorker. Translated by Jamey Gambrell.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (Spring 1991). "Night". Fiction. The Paris Review. 118.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: year (link) - Tolstaya, Tatyana (17 January 2000). "White Walls". Fiction. The New Yorker. Translated by Jamey Gambrell.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (12 March 2007). "See the Other Side". Fiction. The New Yorker. 83. Translated by Jamey Gambrell. Retrieved 24 March 2017.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (18 January 2016). "Aspic". Fiction. The New Yorker. 92. Translated by Anya Migdal. Retrieved 24 March 2017.
Essays and reporting
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (1992). "Is There Hope for Pushkin's Children?" (PDF). Wilson Quarterly. 16. Retrieved 24 March 2017.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (29 February 1996). "On Joseph Brodsky". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 31 March 2015.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (28 December 1998). "The Snow Collectors". Fiction. The New Yorker. Translated by Jamey Gambrell.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (25 May 2000). "The Making of Mr Putin". The New York Review of Books. Translated by Jamey Gambrell. Retrieved 31 March 2015.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (20 September 2000). "Of Saints and Servants". Personal history. Project Syndicate. Translated by Anya Migdal. Retrieved 24 March 2017.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (26 December 2005). "Yorick: Uncovering the bones of a grandmother's past". Personal History. The New Yorker. 81 (41). Retrieved 24 March 2017.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (22–29 December 2014). "Bus Stop". Inner Worlds. The New Yorker. 90 (41). Translated by Jamey Gambrell: 123. Retrieved 31 March 2015.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (28 December 2014). "The Beauty, the Journalist, and the Titanic". BBC Magazine. Retrieved 24 March 2017.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (12 June 2015). "The Square". Cultural Comment. The New Yorker. 91. Translated by Anya Migdal. Retrieved 31 March 2015.
- Tolstaya, Tatyana (21 June 2015). "Father". Cultural Comment. The New Yorker. 91. Translated by Anya Migdal. Retrieved 31 March 2015.
References
- ^ [1], nyrb.com, 24 March 2017.
- ^ Ratings of top 100 leading Web design firms in Russia −2013 Template:Ru icon Google translation
- ^ [2], nytimes.com, 25 Apr 1989.
- ^ [3], nytimes.com, 11 Feb 2003.
- ^ [4], nyrb.com, 22 March 2017.
- ^ [5], Encyclopedia of Russian History, encyclopedia.com, 24 March 2017, 13 May 2015.
- ^ [6], nyrb.com, The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell.
- ^ Profile, rbth.com, 13 May 2015.
Further reading
- Hamilton, Denise (12 May 1992). "A Literary Heiress". Cultural Comment. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 24 March 2017.
- Goscilo, Helena. 1996. The Explosive World of Tatyana N. Tolstaya's Fiction. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
External links
- About Tatyana Tolstaya Template:Ru icon
- Tolstaya in the Internet litcafe Template:Ru icon
- Several reviews of Kys Template:Ru icon
- 1951 births
- 20th-century women writers
- Living people
- Russian women novelists
- Russian publishers (people)
- Russian women short story writers
- Russian television personalities
- Russian women writers
- Saint Petersburg State University alumni
- Soviet novelists
- Soviet short story writers
- 20th-century Russian short story writers
- Soviet women writers
- Soviet writers
- The New Yorker people
- Tolstoy family
- Russian women essayists
- Writers from Saint Petersburg
- 20th-century essayists