On The Golden Porch

Thirteen stories--by the first woman in years to rank among Russia's most important writers--celebrate courage and the will to endure among the people who live on the periphery of society but who dream with a redeeming passion. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Thirteen stories--by the first woman in years to rank among Russia's most important writers--celebrate courage and the will to endure among the people who live on the periphery of society but who dream with a redeeming passion. "From the Trade Paperback edition.

"First Published in 1998, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company."

Thirteen stories--by the first woman in years to rank among Russia's most important writers--celebrate courage and the will to endure among the people who live on the periphery of society but who dream with a redeeming passion. "From the Trade Paperback edition.

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“Tolstaya carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down.” –Time Tatyana Tolstaya’s short stories—with their unpredictable fairy-tale plots, appealingly eccentric characters, and stylistic abundance and flair—established her in the 1980s as one of modern Russia’s finest writers. Since then her work has been translated throughout the world. Edna O’Brien has called Tolstaya “an enchantress.” Anita Desai has spoken of her work’s “richness and ardent life.” Mixing heartbreak and humor, dizzying flights of fantasy and plunging descents to earth, Tolstaya is the natural successor in a great Russian literary lineage that includes Gogol, Yuri Olesha, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. White Walls is the most comprehensive collection of Tolstaya’s short fiction to be published in English so far. It presents the contents of her two previous collections, On the Golden Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog, along with several previously uncollected stories. Tolstaya writes of lonely children and lost love, of philosophers of the absurd and poets working as janitors, of angels and halfwits. She shows how the extraordinary will suddenly erupt in the midst of ordinary life, as she explores the human condition with a matchless combination of unbound imagination and unapologetic sympathy.

Helena Goscilo spotlights Tolstaya's rich interweaving of myth, folklore, songs, children's games, and literary texts into stories of stunning imaginative power. Tolstaya's stylistic pyrotechnics vividly illuminate immemorial concerns about life's meaning, the role of art and fantasy in the modern world, the nature of memory and narrative, and the status of "innocence" and "truth." Finally, The Explosive World of Tatyanna N. Tolstaya's Fiction assesses how Tolstaya's rhetorical strategies have led critics to label her poetic prose "postmodernist," although she ultimately emerges as a writer of traditional neohumanist values with a modernist technique.