Tatyana Tolstaya | |
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2008
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Born | Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya 3 May 1951 Leningrad, USSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russia) |
Occupation | Writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, essayist |
Alma mater | Saint Petersburg State University |
Website | |
About Tatyana Tolstaya (Russian) |
Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya (Russian: Татья́на Ники́тична Толста́я; born 3 May 1951) is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family.
Tolstaya was born in Leningrad into a family of writers. Her paternal grandfather, Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, was a pioneering science fiction writer, and Natalia Krandievskaya, his wife, was a poet. Mikhail Lozinsky, her maternal grandfather, was a literary translator. Tolstaya's sister, Natalia was a writer as well. Her son, Artemy Lebedev, is the founder-owner of Art. Lebedev Studio, a Russian web design firm.
Tolstaya received her education at the department of classical philology of the Leningrad State University. She moved to Moscow in the early 1980s and started working in the Nauka publishing house.
Her first short story, "On a Golden Porch" (На златом крыльце сидели), appeared in Avrora magazine in 1983 and marked the start of Tolstaya's literary career. Her novel The Slynx/Kys (Кысь, 2000) is a dystopian novel filled with literary allusions. She co-hosts a Russian television programme, The School for Scandal (Школа злословия, named after a play by Richard Sheridan). She conducts interviews with representatives of contemporary Russian culture and politics.