Word: tolstaya
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SLEEPWALKER IN A FOG by Tatyana Tolstaya...
...people of what is still the largest country on earth are playing Russian roulette with history, producing a dizzying rush of events that defy comprehension. Tatyana Tolstaya, the great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, helps us make human sense of the game and the gamblers...
...Tolstaya's eight stories, while never more than obliquely political, illustrate the forces that have gnawed away the structure of the world she describes. At a high school reunion, a fat and happy apparatchik sweeps up in his limo to be greeted with cold shoulders instead of warm hugs as his former classmates berate him for the oppressive privileges of the nomenklatura. Another character believes ideological purity will win him a plum diplomatic appointment. He not only forbids his wife to subscribe to a literary magazine and crosses out all suspiciously surnamed acquaintances from his address book, but also finally...
...Tolstaya so obviously loves her language, "the Russian word, so powerful and poisonous and yet loving and lithe," that even in translation she carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down. Like the quirky, clinical images of photographer Diane Arbus, Tolstaya's portraits embrace the strange, even the monstrous, who must not be pushed away uncontemplated, because they are part...
Russian sentimentality can be honey sweet, but Tolstaya spikes it with the vinegar of the circumstances that afflict her hapless dreamers. The story of an 80-year-old mother who has spent most of her life caring for her retarded son is told in the voice of that man-child. His burbling narrative takes us through his day as he waits for his mother to rise, dress her thickened body and take up the constant guard she can never relinquish. Like the immobile, anonymous soldier guarding a tomb, she is always present but never animated as the pain...