Tatyana Tolstaya
Encyclopedia
Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya ' onMouseout='HidePop("44002")' href="/topics/Saint_Petersburg">Leningrad
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

) is a Russian
Russians
The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....

 writer, TV host, publicist
Publicist
A publicist is a person whose job is to generate and manage publicity for a public figure, especially a celebrity, a business, or for a work such as a book, film or album...

, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family.

Family

She was born into a family of rich literary tradition. Her paternal grandfather was Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, an important Russian-Soviet writer known as 'the Red Count', author of Peter I (Пётр Первый) and other novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

s. His wife Natalia Krandievskaya was an influential poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

. The grandfather on the maternal side was a literary translator, Mikhail Lozinsky
Mikhail Lozinsky
Mikhail Leonidovich Lozinsky is deemed to be the most accomplished Russian translator of the 20th century...

. Tatyana Tolstaya's sister Natalia Tolstaya
Natalia Tolstaya
Natalia Nikitichna Tolstaya was a Russian writer and translator from the Tolstoy family. She was a granddaughter of writer Alexei Tolstoy and poet Mikhail Lozinsky, and sister of the writer Tatyana Tolstaya. She taught for many years at Saint Petersburg State University, from which she had also...

 was a writer as well. Her son, Artemy Lebedev, is the founder and owner of Art. Lebedev Studio
Art. Lebedev Studio
Art. Lebedev Studio is a design company in Russia, founded in 1995 by Artemy Lebedev.The studio creates industrial and graphic design for commercial entities and doesn't accept work from private citizens and political or religious organizations...

, the first and best-known Web design studio in Russia.

Life and work

Tolstaya received her education at the department of classical
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...

 philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 of the Leningrad State University. She moved to Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

 in the early 1980s and started working in the Nauka
Nauka
Nauka is a Russian publisher of academic books and journals. Established in the USSR in 1923, it was called USSR Academy of Sciences Publisher until 1963. Until 1934 the publisher was based in Leningrad, then moved to Moscow. Its logo depicts an open book with Sputnik 1 above it.Nauka was the main...

 publishing house. Her first short story, "On a Golden Porch" (На златом крыльце сидели), appeared in Avrora magazine in 1983 and marked the start of Tolstaya's literary career.

Tolstaya's novel The Slynx/Kys (Кысь, 2000) is a dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...

n novel filled with literary allusions. Several collections of short stories by Tatyana Tolstaya are popular all over Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

, and she is regarded by many as one of the foremost writers of today.

Tatyana Tolstaya is the co-host of a very successful Russian TV show The School for Scandal (Школа злословия), where she interviews representatives of Russian culture
Russian culture
Russian culture is associated with the country of Russia and, sometimes, specifically with ethnic Russians. It has a rich history and can boast a long tradition of excellence in every aspect of the arts, especially when it comes to literature and philosophy, classical music and ballet, architecture...

 and politics. Her yearly schedule is divided between the US, where she spends half of the year lecturing at a university, and Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

.

In translation

  • On the Golden Porch, and other stories Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989, then Penguin, 1990, ISBN 0-14-012275-3.
  • The Slynx New York Review of Books Classics, 2007, ISBN 1-59017-196-9
  • White Walls New York Review of Books Classics, 2007, ISBN 1-59017-197-7

Trivia

  • The American band Okkervil River take their name from one of her stories. It is also a name of a river in St. Petersburg.

External links


Online texts

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