[MUSIC] We continue our course and now start it's six part devoted to the works of Tatyana Tolstaya and Mikhail Sishkin. I called this path between post-modernism and human literature because post-modernism, although it was a dominant trend in the literature of '90s, was not a one and only trend. Literature and art are developing in such a fashion that some dominant style influences almost all the writers. But each of them preserves his or her own individuality and digress somewhere from this from this mainstream path, and we will see we it on the example of these two writers. First of all, I would like to remind you about our list of required literature. In this module, It consists only of two short stories. I asked you to read Tatyana Tolstaya's story The River and the story by Mikhail Shishkin, The Calligraphy Lesson. And as ever, I should add that if you like to read more Tolstaya stories, you are welcome. They are all translated into English. As for Shishkin, he is the author of long and very much sophisticated novels, and you can try to read them. They also have been translated. Let's begin from Tatyana Tolstaya's biography. I should say that she belongs to the family which was very famous and influential in the culture of 20th century, Russia. Tolstaya's grandfather, the writer Alexi Nikolayevich Tolstoy, whose dates are 1883, 1945, called Red Count, was a prominent Soviet writer over of many books, including Civil War epic novel, science fiction, fairy tales, plays, and so on. His most famous unfinished novel is devoted to Peter the Great. He was the second main writer in the Soviet Union in Soviet hierarchy in Stalinist times immediately after Maxim Gorky. And the other Tatyana Tolstaya's grandfather was famous, although in some other field. Mikhail Lozinsky was the best translator of poetry in '20s up to '50s. His works include translations of Shakespeare, Coleridge, Kipling, Lope de Vega, Goethe, Voltaire, Moliere, and many others. But his most prominent work was the full translation of Dante's Divina commedia, which has become canonical in Russian. Lozinksy was also a poet, a close friend of Akhmatova and Mandelstam. And many other Tolstaya's relatives had left their mark in Russian culture. Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad in 1951 in a big family of physicist Nikita Tolstoy and the future Dean of the Department of Physics of Saint Petersburg University, and the chairman of the St Petersburg branch of Russian Cultural Foundation. She wrote a very interesting memoirs about her father, her brothers and her sisters. One of her sisters, Natalia, was also a writer, and they even were publishing their stories under one cover. And of course, all world literature was in Tatyana Tolstaya's disposal in her childhood. She had read everything in that time, including many forbidden books like Nabakov's. Her father brought Nabokov's book from abroad secretly and illegally. It is important for us because it means that Tatyana Tolstaya's works are very much dependent on literature, they need some erudition for better understanding. Tatyana Tolstaya graduated from St Petersburg State University, where she has been studying Classical philology. And then, she married her fellow student of Classics, and the family moved to Moscow where she was working as a proofreader and was writing her first stories. Tolstaya's writer's destiny was very happy. Several of her texts were published even before the perestroika. The first one appeared in 1983. And later, she had published a dozen of short stories, which remain her best ones up until today. And they were always greeted by the critics as well as by the readers. Her first collection of short stories, On the Golden Porch, was published in 1987, and it allowed critics to list her among perestroika discovered writers, new writers. Although she was already well-known enough at the time of this book's appearance, the critics proclaimed her one of the most talented, most gifted writers of the new generation. And she is a favorite of literary scholars as well. They wrote about her much more than she wrote herself. Tolstaya is not a prolific writer, but Tolstaya scholars are very much prolific. In 1988, Tolstaya has presented the Soviet readers the first publication of Sasha Sokolov in the Magazine. And honestly speaking, it could rather be vice versa because one can call Tolstaya a pupil Sokolov, literary pupil. And both of them are Nabokov's followers. Sokolov refused to read Nabokov's books in his early years, but Tolstaya did not. In 1990s, Tolstaya lived and worked in the United States at several universities teach in Russian literature and creative writing. She wrote later rather sarcastic memoirs about this period. And in America, she had finished her one and only novel, the famous novel called The Slynx, published in 2001. The title is absolutely untranslatable. In Russian, it's [FOREIGN], but this neologism Slynx, reminding links sly and sphinx is a good catch of the translator Jamey Gambrell. She came back to Russia on the peak of her success and became a TV hostess. Together, her friend and the film director Smirnova, Tolstaya was producing the talk show The School for Scandal, named after the play of Richard Sheridan, where she conducted ironic and provocative interviews with representatives of contemporary Russian culture and politics. The program, unfortunately was closed in 2014 after more than 400 shows. Tatyana Tolstaya lives in Moscow. She is a very popular blogger, and publishes from time to time some texts, mostly essays, but also memoirs and short stories. Many critics and readers reproach her that she has almost completely left creative writing. But I think that in any case she is already a part of the big history of Russian literature due to her gold dozen of early stories and her novel. Let's talk about them in more detail. Thank you.
