Tatyana Tolstaya is a Russian short story writer born in 1951. Highly respected for her work in Russia, Tolstaya's writing is influenced by Dostoyevski, Tolstoy and Gogol. She has spent a number of years teaching in the USA and is critical of what she sees as the shallow way of life and lack of culture there. Tolsatya is the great-niece of Leo Tolstoy.

Tolstaya, Tatyana (b. 1951), Russian short story writer. A Leningrader from an illustrious literary family, Tolstaya specialized in classics at Leningrad State University, graduated in 1974, and moved to Moscow, where she worked at the Nauka publishing house.
After her literary debut with the story On the Golden Porch (1983), during glasnost she acquired international fame when the slim collection of her Stories by the same title (1987) was translated into ten languages. Since 1988 she has dii’ided her time between Moscow and the US, where she has taught, lectured on Russian culture, and written review essays for mainstream publications.
Tolstaya's fictional oeuvre consists of twenty-one stories, all but one translated in On the Golden Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog (1992). These inordinately condensed narratives meditate, in vivid, trope-saturated prose, on such universal concerns as time, language, imagination, aiid memory. With the aid of myth, folklore, and numerous intertexts, she muses on the elusive significance of a given life in Sonia (1984); the isolation of the individual personality in Sweet Dreams, Son (1986); the conflicting claims of spirit and matter in Hunting the Wooly Mammoth (1985); the complex interplay between perception and language in Night (1987); and the transforming power of imagination and memory in Sweet Shura (1985).

A highly colorful, kaleidoscopic style is her authorial signature, with lush, metaphorfreighted sentences marked by perpetual shifts in perspective, voice, and mood, elaborate instrumentation, alternation between poetic lyricism and irony, between elevated diction and colloquialisms. A stylist par excellence, Tolstaya spotlights the dazzling capabilities of the Russian language in a mode that reviews the aesthetics of Russia's 1920s.