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Monuments to the Forgotten
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19964 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1992 |
2,475 Words |
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Richard Lourie
Richard Lourie is the author of Sakharov: A Biography. |
SLEEPWALKER IN A FOG
Tatyana Tolstaya, translated from Russian by Jamey Gambrell
New York: Knopf, 1992
192 pp., $19.00
Tatyana Tolstaya has made a name for herself over the last few years both in her native Russia and in America, where she frequently lectures. Making a name is always of importance to a writer, but in her case it may well have had extra significance. She is the great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy (Tolstaya being the feminine of Tolstoy) and the granddaughter of Alexei Tolstoy, a prominent Soviet novelist. Her great-granduncle wrote epics such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina before deciding that literature was at bottom no more than yet another amusement for the leisured classes. He then devoted the rest of his life to the pursuit of something of substance and enduring significance--God, the truth, good works. His renunciations were as epic as his novels.
Tatyana Tolstaya's grandfather, Alexei, also preferred the broad canvas and is best known for his historical novel on the life of Peter the Great, itself no small subject. Alexei Tolstoy was known as the "Red Count" because, as a noble, he emigrated after the revolution but then returned to the Soviet Union, where he adapted all too well. Whether by temperament or conscious choice, Tatyana Tolstaya has rejected the scope of her great forebears and has staked her claim on a narrow strip that runs between fantasy and misery.
It is a very unusual mélange she has created. Her style is lyrical, her tone fantastical, and yet her subjects are as ordinary as potatoes. Tolstaya turns her back on history, which so attracted her illustrious ancestors and which so devastated Russia in the twentieth century. The war and terror are mentioned only in passing, as if they were only bloody and self-important distractions from the real business of living a human life built around desire and disappointment.
The most common of Russian clay
Tolstaya does not write about great events, nor does she write about "great" people. Her characters are the most common of Russian clay. Nothing much happens in their lives and nothing much happens in the stories about them. It's all in the telling. Or almost all. For something does happen in those stories, to those people, an indefinable something called life itself. In the story titled "Heavenly Flame," a
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