Tatyana Tolstaya
| Tatyana Tolstaya | |
|---|---|
 2008 | |
| Born |
3 May 1951 Leningrad, USSR (now Saint Peterburg, Russia) |
| Occupation | Writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, essayist |
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.
Family
She was born in Leningrad, 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 novels. His wife Natalia Krandievskaya was an influential poet. The grandfather on the maternal side was a literary translator, Mikhail Lozinsky. Tatyana Tolstaya's sister Natalia Tolstaya was a writer as well. Her son, Artemy Lebedev, is the founder and owner of Art. Lebedev Studio, the first and one of the best-known[1] Web design studio in Russia.
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. 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 dystopian novel filled with literary allusions. Several collections of short stories by Tatyana Tolstaya are popular all over Russia, 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, named after a play by Richard Sheridan), where she interviews representatives of Russian culture and politics. Her yearly schedule is divided between the US, where she spends half of the year lecturing at a university, and Russia.
Books
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.
References
External links
- About Tatyana Tolstaya (Russian)
- Tolstaya in the Internet litcafe (Russian)
- Several reviews of Kys (Russian)
Online texts
- Kys, some short stories and essays in full text from lib.ru (Russian)
- The short story "See the other side" in english translation in The New Yorker
- The short story "Yorick" in english translation in The New Yorker
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