Tatyana Tolstaya (b. 1951)

Abstract Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad into one of the city ‘s most distinguished lit-erary families. She is the great-grandniece of Lev Tolstoy and the granddaughter of the writer, dramatist, and poet Aleksei Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1883–1945), best known for his trilogy about the Revolution, Road to Calvary,* begun while he was temporarily an émigré in Berlin. Though he had initially been an outspoken oppon-ent of Bolshevism, Aleksei Tolstoy returned to the Soviet Union in 1923 and became one of the very few Russians to maintain a nobleman ‘s life-style while successfully demonstrating his ‘loyalty ‘ to the new state: so successfully, indeed, that he was appointed Chairman of the USSR Writers ‘ Union after Gorky ‘s death and won several Stalin Prizes for his work. Aleksei ‘s wife was the poet Natalya Krandiyevskaya, herself from a literary family, while Tolstaya ‘s maternal grandfather, as she relates in the interview that follows, was the distinguished translator Mikhail Lozinsky, whose friends included the poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov.