Tatyana Tolstaya
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Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya (Template:Langx; born May 3, 1951) is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family.
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.<ref>Ratings of top 100 leading Web design firms in Russia −2013 Template:In lang Google translation</ref>
Life and work
1951—1983: early years
Tatiana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad to a physicist professor Template:Interlanguage link and Natalya Mikhailovna Lozinskaya.<ref name="dosug">Template:Cite web</ref> With six siblings, she grew up in the Template:Interlanguage link.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
In 1974, Tolstaya graduated from the department of classical philology of the Leningrad State University. In the same year, she married a philologist Andrey Lebedev. The couple moved to Moscow in the early 1980s, where Tolstaya started working in the Nauka publishing house.<ref name="ria">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=musstudies/>
As recalled by Tolstaya, in November 1982 she underwent an operation on her eyes and had to spend three months in rehabilitation, unable to see in the bright light. She believes that period brought her into writing: without a constant flow of information from the world, her mind cleared and she discovered in herself a desire to write down plots and stories.<ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Dead link</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=prima>Template:Cite web</ref>
1983—1989: start of literary career
In 1983, Tolstaya emerged as a literary critic.<ref name=musstudies/>
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".<ref>[1], nytimes.com, 25 Apr 1989.</ref> 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."<ref>[2], nytimes.com, 11 Feb 2003.</ref> In 1987, a collection of short stories under the same title — "On the Golden Porch" — was translated into English and received positive reviews.<ref name=musstudies/> When in 1988 the book was released in Russia, more than 50,000 copies were sold out in hours.<ref name=hamilton/> She was a visiting professor teaching Russian Literature at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989.
1990—1999: life in the USA and journalism
In 1990, Tolstaya with her family emigrated to the United States. She began teaching Russian literature and creative writing first at Princeton, then at Skidmore College, and gave lectures in multiple universities.<ref name=bohlen/><ref name=prima/> She also emerged as a journalist and contributed to the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, TLS, the Wilson Quarterly, and also wrote for Russia-based editions such as the Moscow News, the Capital and Russian Telegraph.<ref name=musstudies>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=hamilton>Template:Cite web</ref>
In 1988, Tatyana and her sister Natalya co-authored a book of short stories which was released under the title Sisters.<ref name=musstudies/>
2000—2012: The Slynx, The School for Scandal, speechwriting
In the early 1990s Tolstaya worked in speechwriting for the Union of Right Forces party along with screenwriter and journalist Dunya Smirnova and literary critic Template:Interlanguage link.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
In 1999, Tolstaya moved back to Russia. The next year she released her novel The Slynx (Кысь), 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".<ref>[3], Encyclopedia of Russian History, encyclopedia.com, 24 March 2017, 13 May 2015.</ref> 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".<ref>[4], nyrb.com, The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell.</ref> As confessed by the writer, it took her more than 14 years to compose the novel.<ref name=bohlen>Template:Cite web</ref> By 2003, more than 200,000 copies of The Slynx were sold.<ref name=bohlen/>
Soon after the release of The Slynx, three more books of Tolstaya were published. Two collections of short stories under the titles “Day” and “Night” were followed by the Two, co-authored with her sister Natalya.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
For the twelve years between 2002 and 2014, with her friend Template:Interlanguage link Tolstaya co-hosted a Russian cultural television programme, The School for Scandal (Школа злословия, named after Richard Sheridan's play), on which she conducted interviews with diverse representatives of contemporary Russian culture and politics.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 2003, The School for Scandal was awarded Best Talk Show prize by the Russian National Television.<ref name=musstudies/>
In 2010, with her niece Olga Prokhorova Tolstaya released The Same ABC of Buratino — a collection of poems that should have been inside the book that Buratino had sold away. In an interview to a Russian magazine Tolstaya confessed that she had nurtured the idea of this book since childhood, but only when her children grew up her niece ‘picked up’ the project and helped to write the book.<ref name=musstudies/>
After 2013
On June 12, 2015, The New Yorker published The Square,<ref>[5], Tolstaya, Tatyana. The Square. The New Yorker, Volume 91. Translated by Anya Migdal, June 12, 2015.</ref> a dark homage to the nothingness of Kazimir Malevich's 1915 painting, Black Square, which concludes with a self-referential paragraph.
In 2018, a collection of short stories under the title Aetherial Worlds was released in Russia.<ref name=musstudies/> Written in a playful and poetic language, the stories are a mixture of real and fictional recollections of her childhood, her travels and family.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The book was awarded the Template:Interlanguage link.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Soon it was translated into English and received positive acclaims.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
In 2020, she was awarded the Writer of the Year prize. This award honours prolific writers for their long time contribution to Russian literature.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Bibliography
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Novels
Short fiction
- Collections
- Stories
| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The poet and the muse | 1990 | Template:Cite journal | ||
| Heavenly flame | 1990 | Template:Cite journal | ||
| Most beloved | 1991 | Template:Cite journal | ||
| Night | 1991 | Template:Cite journal | ||
| White walls | 2000 | Template:Cite journal | ||
| See the other side | 2007 | Template:Cite journal | ||
| Aspic | 2016 | Template:Cite journal | ||
| Unnecessary things | 2017 | Template:Cite journal |
Non-fiction
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- Template:Cite web<ref group=lower-alpha name="webonly">Available on website only.</ref>
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- Notes
References
Further reading
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- Goscilo, Helena. 1996. The Explosive World of Tatyana N. Tolstaya's Fiction. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
External links
- Pages with broken file links
- 1951 births
- Living people
- Russian women novelists
- Russian publishers (people)
- Russian women short story writers
- Russian television personalities
- Saint Petersburg State University alumni
- Soviet novelists
- Soviet short story writers
- 20th-century Russian short story writers
- The New Yorker people
- Tolstoy family
- Russian women essayists
- Writers from Saint Petersburg
- 20th-century Russian essayists
- 20th-century Russian women
- Soviet women novelists
- Russian women television personalities