Tatyana Tolstaya to read April 5 and 6

Writer Tatyana Tolstaya, one of the foremost chroniclers of post-Gorbachev Russia, will present a pair of events at Washington University Monday, April 5, and Tuesday, April 6.

Tolstaya, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in The Writing Program in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences, will speak on the craft of writing at 8 p.m. Monday, April 5. She then will present a reading from her own work at 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 6.

Both events — part of The Writing Program’s spring Reading Series — are free and open to the public and take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall.

Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle. A reception and book signing immediately will follow each talk. For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or e-mail David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.

Born in Leningrad in 1951 to an aristocratic literary family, Tolstaya is the great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy and the granddaughter of Alexei Tolstoy. After completing a degree in classics at Leningrad State University, in 1974, she moved to Moscow and worked for several years at the Nauka publishing house.

Tolstaya’s first two collections, On the Golden Porch (1987) and Limpopo (1991), explore the turbulence of the glasnost period and established her as a major figure in Russian letters.

In addition, she spent several years living and teaching in the United States, where her acerbic essays about contemporary Russian life and politics appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The New Republic, among others. She also has co-hosted a popular Russian television show, The School for Scandal.

In 2000, Tolstaya released her first novel, The Slynx, a dystopian fantasy set 200 years after civilization ended in a cataclysmic event known as the Blast. The story centers on Benedikt, a young scribe whose job is to copy old books, which are then presented as the words of the despot Fyodor Kuzmich. Yet Benedikt never has actually read a book himself — until, that is, he is introduced to a secret library that sparks his own political ambitions.

“Ms. Tolstaya repeatedly makes the point that Benedikt and company are the ones who are the real animals,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. “They are the Slynx of the title, a mythical beast, waiting in the forest to pounce on innocent victims; a destroyer of reason and a threat to freedom.”

Other books in English include the story collections Sleepwalker in a Fog (1993) and White Walls (2007).