This study of the work of Tatyana N. Tolstaya initiates the reader into the paradoxes of her fictional universe: a poetic realm ruled by language, to which the mysteries of life, imagination, memory and death are subject.

Helena Goscilo spotlights Tolstaya's rich interweaving of myth, folklore, songs, children's games, and literary texts into stories of stunning imaginative power. Tolstaya's stylistic pyrotechnics vividly illuminate immemorial concerns about life's meaning, the role of art and fantasy in the modern world, the nature of memory and narrative, and the status of "innocence" and "truth." Finally, The Explosive World of Tatyanna N. Tolstaya's Fiction assesses how Tolstaya's rhetorical strategies have led critics to label her poetic prose "postmodernist, " although she ultimately emerges as a writer...