Word: tolstaya
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Russian novelist Tatyana Tolstaya's most recent book is Sleepwalker...
...kept their head down and mouth shut. They began speaking and writing about the old taboos: the crimes of Stalin, of the KGB and even of Lenin. Soon the daily and weekly press was bursting with stupefying revelations and admissions. It was "wonderful for the intelligentsia," the writer Tatyana Tolstaya told Remnick, but most of all "it is a revolution for the proletariat...
...While Tolstaya is a caustic chronicler of perpetual yearning and casual cruelty, she can also be wildly funny, capturing the lunatic humor that leavens these hardscrabble lives. Lyonechka, a rarely employed writer who has already thrown away one newspaper job by introducing an unwelcome sardonic note to the obituary column, lasts no longer at a women's magazine after he starts a recipe with the words "Let's be frank -- there ain't nothing...
...Tolstaya roams the nighttime city, taking us behind the flickering blue lights of a thousand windows. We share the unsought intimacy of overpeopled apartments where "another person's wall darkens and swells with autumn anguish." Those who suffer must not only endure their plight; they must also surrender the peculiarly human right to be themselves: to lust, to scheme, to betray, to generally behave badly. Tolstaya is there to remind us that not even history at its most reckless can rob individuals of the right to their own stories...
BOOKS Tatyana Tolstaya: a chronicler of Russian yearning and cruelty...