The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya. Boston. 2003. Houghton Mifflin. 0618124977. Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell. 278 pages. hardcover. Cover: Luba Lukova.

DESCRIPTION - In what remains of Moscow some two hundred years after ‘the Blast', a community persists in primitive, ridiculous, and often brutal circumstances. Mice are the current source of food, clothes, and commerce as well as humor. Owning books in this society is prohibited by the tyrant, who plagiarizes the old masters, becoming his people's sole writer. One of the tyrant's scribes, Benedikt, is the main narrator of THE SLYNX. He is in love with books as objects but is unable to derive any meaning or moral benefit from them. In the dystopian world of her satirical first novel, Tatyana Tolstaya addresses lust, cruelty, egotism, and ignorance through Benedikt's distorted eyes. Throughout the novel lurks the Slynx, the imagined catlike creature whose fearsome, shadowy presence threatens the mice and the humans alike. As Pearl K. Bell wrote of Tatyana Tolstaya on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, ‘The blazing vitality of [her] imagination, the high-spirited playfulness . . . place her in that uniquely Russian line of satirists and surrealists.' David Remnick has called her ‘the most promising of all the ‘post-Soviet' writers . . . She sounds like no one else.' A great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, Tatyana Tolstaya was born in St. Petersburg. She is the author of two collections of stories and of PUSHKIN'S CHILDREN: WRITINGS ON RUSSIA AND RUSSIANS. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 2001, two major Russian literary awards. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and other publications. After teaching at Princeton University and for many years at Skidmore College, she now lives in Moscow. Jamey Gambrell has been translating Tatyana Tolstaya's fiction and non-fiction since 1990. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. . .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya (born 3 May 1951) is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family, known for her fiction and "acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life". Tolstaya was born in Leningrad into a family of writers. Her paternal grandfather, Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, was a pioneering science fiction writer, and the son of Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoy (1849–1900) and Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva (1854–1906), a relative of Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev and the writer Ivan Turgenev. Tolstaya's paternal grandmother was the poet Natalia Krandievskaya. Mikhail Lozinsky (1886-1955), her maternal grandfather, was a literary translator renowned for his translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy. Tolstaya's sister, Her first short story, "On the Golden Porch", appeared in Avrora magazine in 1983 and marked the start of Tolstaya's literary career, and her story collection of the same name established Tolstaya as one of the foremost writers of the perestroika and post-Soviet period. As Michiko Kakutani writes, "one can find echoes...of her great-granduncle Leo Tolstoy's work - his love of nature, his psychological insight, his attention to the details of everyday life". But "her luminous, haunting stories most insistently recall the work of Chekhov, mapping characters' inner lives and unfulfilled dreams with uncommon sympathy and insight", and also display "the author's Nabokovian love of language and her affinity for strange excursions into the surreal, reminiscent of Bulgakov and Gogol." She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities. Her novel The Slynx is a dystopian vision of post-nuclear Russian life in what was once (now forgotten) Moscow, presenting a negative Bildungsroman that in part confronts "disappointments of post-Soviet Russian political and social life". It has been described as "an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia's past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now". For the twelve years between 2002 and 2014, Tolstaya co-hosted a Russian cultural television programme, The School for Scandal, named after play by Richard Sheridan), on which she conducted interviews with diverse representatives of contemporary Russian culture and politics.

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