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In Cannibalistic Times

  In Cannibalistic Times | Tatyana Tolstaya, Jamey Gambrell | The New York Review of Books In Cannibalistic Times Tatyana Tolstaya , translated by Jamey Gambrell April 11, 1991 issue Reviewed: The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest Oxford University Press, 570 pp., $24.95 Last year Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror was translated into Russian and published in the USSR in the journal Neva . (Unfortunately, only the first edition was published. I hope that the second, revised and enlarged edition will be published as well, if it is not suppressed by the censorship so recently revived in the Soviet Union.) The fate of this book in the USSR is truly remarkable. Many of those who opened Neva in 1989–1990 exclaimed: “But I know all this stuff already!” How did they know it? From Conquest himself. The first edition appeared twenty years ago in English, was translated into Russian, and infiltrated what was then a closed country. It quickly became an underground best seller,...
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Bus Stop

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  Inner Worlds Bus Stop By Tatyana Tolstaya December 15, 2014 Save this story Illustration by Jason Holley Brezhnev died on November 10, 1982, just a few days after I was operated on at Dr. Fyodorov’s famous eye clinic. I was nearsighted, and Fyodorov and his doctors, it was said, could correct your vision. They made incisions in the cornea, so that it splayed open and then healed closer to the lens, where the rays of light focus. (Imagine that you bought a beret that was too small, then made slits along the radius and inserted wedges so that it would fit your head.) They made the cuts with a Neva razor; they weren’t using lasers yet in 1982. The doctor’s art consisted of making these incisions at the correct depth, so that, when the eyes healed, your vision would be 20/20. You would be able to read not just the big letters at the top of the chart but the tiny ones at the very bottom as well. However, for the three months it took to heal you’d have aches and sharp pains, and produc...
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Moments of Illumination

  Q. & A. Moments of Illumination By Deborah Treisman March 4, 2007 Save this story In this issue, Tatyana Tolstaya publishes the short story “See the Other Side.” Here, in a conversation with The New Yorker ’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, she sheds light on the perils of becoming a writer, on her family, and on her connection to Ravenna. DEBORAH TREISMAN: It feels as though this piece of fiction, “See the Other Side,” has a strong basis in fact. Did your father actually send you a postcard from Ravenna? TATYANA TOLSTAYA: Yes and no. My father did inscribe a postcard with a picture of a mosaic to me, but he actually brought it back with him. Although the postcard in the story makes it through the Italian and Russian postal services, in reality it was impossible to trust either! It was a cheap postcard. (They all are.) I remember my father trying to express his strong feelings about the beauty of the original. At the time I was hardly impressed. Later, when I saw things wi...
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