Sleepwalker In a Fog
New York, N.Y. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. [10], 192, [6] pages. Signed, in Russian, on the front free endpaper by the author. Signature verified by a native Russian writer and speaker. Signature verified through on-line research. Chapters include Sleepwalker in a Fog; Serafim; The Moon Came Out; Night; Heavenly Flame; Most Beloved; The Poet and the Muse; and Limpopo. The stories in this book were originally published separately in Russian. Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya (born 3 May 1951) is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family, known for her fiction and "acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life". 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 the Golden Porch" 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. She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities. For the twelve years between 2002 and 2014, Tolstaya co-hosted a Russian cultural television programme, The School for Scandal, on which she conducted interviews with diverse representatives of contemporary Russian culture and politics. In seven short stories and a novella, Tolstaya makes the ordinary extraordinary, and mesmerizes us with the lives of those we might never have noticed. Here is Denisov, who fears his greatest accomplishment in life will be the treatise he wrote--and tore up--on the impossibility of Australia's existence. He is soon to become the fourth husband of Lora, who talks incessantly and dreams of having a thick fluffy tail. They live in a creaky apartment with Lora's widower father, a retired zoologist and active somnambulist. Natasha, who once "carried in her soul a limpid golden glass of champagne happiness," holds the reader enthralled as she searches Leningrad and her own memory for her lost love Konovalov. We witness Dmitry Ilich staging an elaborate practical joke as a means of seducing Olga Mikhailovna. We watch, astonished, as the doctor Nina, having diagnosed the poet Grishunya, in short order cures him, courts him, marries him, houses him, and settles his fate. Working freely but unmistakably in the traditions of Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov, the author, through her kaleidoscope of shifting moods and colors, feelings, and fantasies, gives us a crystalline vision of the human condition. Derived from a Kirkus review: In a follow-up collection of eight stories to the much- acclaimed On the Golden Porch, Tolstaya is, by turns, deftly Chekhovian, orchestrating an ensemble of characters, and deeply internal, so that a character's revelry or fantasy redeems or at least enlarges a squalid present age. The title piece—one about Denisov, who has tried and failed at every art but whose imagination relieves his dreary life, and about his fiancee, Lora, who brings her father to a country healer so that his ``warped energy fields'' can be made right—is a dazzling tour de force with a precise metaphoric vision. Likewise, in ``The Moon Came Out,'' a heartbreaker written in translucent lyrical prose, Natasha searches Leningrad (and her memory) for her lost love. ``Most Beloved'' is a moving fictional reminiscence of childhood and youth at a country dacha, where the narrator was overseen by Zhenechka. It manages to evoke the past nostalgically while avoiding sentimentality. Other stories are more satirical, though not necessarily lighter: In ``The Poet and the Muse,'' for example, Nina tries to cure the poet Grushunya, allowing Tolstaya to indulge in an on-target satire of bohemian life; ``Limpopo,'' on the other hand, while containing satirical elements about the attempt of an activist journalist to initiate a forlorn black immigrant ``into his poetic faith,'' is finally haunting in its dramatization of displacement. Tolstaya displays marvelous erudition and an elegiac tone. Her range and depth of feeling make this second collection as remarkable as her first. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Human condition; Changing Moods, Short Stories, Limpopo, Poet, Muse, Beloved, Heavenly, Flame, Night, Moon, Seafim, Sleepwalker, Fog, Denisov, Satire, Russian Literature
ISBN: 0394587316
[Book #81274]
Price: $175.00