Tatyana Tolstaya

Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya (; born 3 May 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.

Life and work

1951—1983: early years Tatiana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad to a physicist professor and Natalya Mikhailovna Lozinskaya. With six siblings, she grew up in the .

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.

1983—1989: start of literary career

In 1983, Tolstaya emerged as a literary critic. 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." In 1987, a collection of short stories under the same title — "On the Golden Porch" — was translated into English and received positive reviews.

In 1988, Tatyana and her sister Natalya co-authored a book of short stories which was released under the title Sisters.

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". 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". As confessed by the writer, it took her more than 14 years to compose the novel. By 2003, more than 200,000 copies of The Slynx were sold.

For the twelve years between 2002 and 2014, with her friend 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. In 2003, The School for Scandal was awarded Best Talk Show prize by the Russian National Television. 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. The book was awarded the . Soon it was translated into English and received positive acclaims.

In 2020, she was awarded the Writer of the Year prize. This award honours prolific writers for their long time contribution to Russian literature.