Tatyana Tolstaya (also Tatiana Tolstaya) is a well-known modern Russian writer, TV-host, publicist, novelist, and essayist.

Life and work

She was born on 3 May, 1951 in Leningrad, into a family of rich literary tradition. Her paternal grandfather was Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, an important Russian-Soviet writer, "the Red count" author of Peter I (Петр Первый) and other novels, his wife Natalia Krandievskaya Tolstaya was an influential poet. The grandfather on the maternal side was a famous literary translator Mikhail Lozinsky. Tatyana Tolstaya's sister Natalia Tolstaya is a writer as well.

Tolstaya received her education at the department of classical philology of the Leningrad State University. She moved to Moscow in early 1980s and started working in the Nauka publishing house. Her first short story On a Golden Porch (На златом крыльце сидели) appeared in The Aurora 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 the general public as one of the foremost writers of today.

Tatyana Tolstaya is the co-host of a very successful Russian TV show called The School for Scandal (Школа злословия), 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.

External links

• Anna Gessen's review of Kys (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~slavic/newsite/review/tolstaia.html)
• Excerpt from The Slynx (http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=excerpt&titleNumber=693005)
• Tolstaya in the Internet litcafe (http://www.tema.ru/rrr/litcafe/tolstaya/) (in Russian)
• Several reviews of Kys (http://www.guelman.ru/slava/kis/index.html) (in Russian)

Online texts

Kys, some short stories and essays in full text from lib.ru (http://www.lib.ru/PROZA/TOLSTAYA/) (in Russian)