Peering into The Russian Soul

By Brigid O''Hara-Forster

SLEEPWALKER IN A FOG by Tatyana Tolstaya

Translated by Jamey Gambrell; Knopf; 192 pages; $19

The people of what is still the largest country on earth are playing Russian roulette with history, producing a dizzying rush of events that defy comprehension. Tatyana Tolstaya, the great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, helps us make human sense of the game and the gamblers.

Tolstaya's eight stories, while never more than obliquely political, illustrate the forces that have gnawed away the structure of the world she describes. At a high school reunion, a fat and happy apparatchik sweeps up in his limo to be greeted with cold shoulders instead of warm hugs as his former classmates berate him for the oppressive privileges of the nomenklatura. Another character believes ideological purity will win him a plum diplomatic appointment. He not only forbids his wife to subscribe to a literary magazine and crosses out all suspiciously surnamed acquaintances from his address book, but also finally smashes all jars of imported food in the house, even the Bulgarian apple jam. The life of a third character is so drab that even a tiny gift from Paris, a red plastic spoon, lends his days a sudden radiance.

Tolstaya so obviously loves her language, "the Russian word, so powerful and poisonous and yet loving and lithe," that even in translation she carves indelible people who roam the imagination long after the book is put down. Like the quirky, clinical images of photographer Diane Arbus, Tolstaya's portraits embrace the strange, even the monstrous, who must not be pushed away uncontemplated, because they are part of us.

Russian sentimentality can be honey sweet, but Tolstaya spikes it with the vinegar of the circumstances that afflict her hapless dreamers. The story of an 80-year-old mother who has spent most of her life caring for her retarded son is told in the voice of that man-child. His burbling narrative takes us through his day as he waits for his mother to rise, dress her thickened body and take up the constant guard she can never relinquish. Like the immobile, anonymous soldier guarding a tomb, she is always present but never animated as the pain of her predicament seeps into us.

While Tolstaya is a caustic chronicler of perpetual yearning and casual cruelty, she can also be wildly funny, capturing the lunatic humor that leavens these hardscrabble lives. Lyonechka, a rarely employed writer who has already thrown away one newspaper job by introducing an unwelcome sardonic note to the obituary column, lasts no longer at a women's magazine after he starts a recipe with the words "Let's be frank -- there ain't nothing to eat."

Tolstaya roams the nighttime city, taking us behind the flickering blue lights of a thousand windows. We share the unsought intimacy of overpeopled apartments where "another person's wall darkens and swells with autumn anguish." Those who suffer must not only endure their plight; they must also surrender the peculiarly human right to be themselves: to lust, to scheme, to betray, to generally behave badly. Tolstaya is there to remind us that not even history at its most reckless can rob individuals of the right to their own stories.