Pushkin's Children
Writing on Russia and Russians
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"Tolstaya's essays in this compact, historically significant volume offer a fascinating, highly intelligent analysis of Russian society and politics" (Publishers Weekly).
These twenty essays address the politics, culture, and literature of Russia with both flair and erudition. Passionate and opinionated, often funny, and using ample material from daily life to underline their ideas and observations, Tatyana Tolstaya's piees range across a variety of subjects. They move in one unique voice from Soviet women, classical Russian cooking, and the bliss of snow to the effect of Pushkin and freedom on Russia writers; from the death of the tsar and the Great Terror to the changes brought by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin in the last decade. Throughout this engaging volume, the Russian temperament comes into high relief. Whether addressing literature or reporting on politics, Tolstaya's writing conveys a deep knowledge of her country and countrymen. Pushkin's Children is a book for anyone interested in the Russian soul.
"Tolstaya is simply the most fearless female observer of the very male-centric culture . . . of the USSR." —Ben Dickinson, Elle
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Written between 1990 and 2000, the 20 essays in this collection offer a progressive, dynamic meditation on Russia's recent political and cultural climate. Many of the pieces are book reviews culled from such publications as the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, but Tolstaya, an internationally acclaimed journalist and fiction writer (The Golden Porch; Sleepwalker in a Fog), goes far beyond the task of reviewing. Her careful and succinct critiques offer original, highly informed takes on the books' subjects, ranging from political biography to cultural history. Tolstaya has little patience for writers who shore shoddy research with patronizing egotism, illustrated by such lines from this stinger of a review of Gail Sheehy's 1990 biography of Gorbachev: "You have to be quite fearless, an adventurer, extraordinarily self-assured, to offer American readers a book about a country that you yourself do not understand." In 1991, Tolstaya defends Yeltsin against criticisms that his decrees to wrest power from Communist Party leaders were undemocratic: "A man who watches a wolf devouring his child does not begin a discussion of animal rights." Tolstaya reserves particular contempt for Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In reviews of two of his works, she finds that the isolated writer and political activist idol was rendered obsolete long before his 1995 return to Russia. In the end, Tolstaya's essays in this compact, historically significant volume offer a fascinating, highly intelligent analysis of Russian society and politics.
