Russian soul food.(Book Talk; Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians)(Book Review)

Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and Russians

By Tatyana Tolstaya. translated by Jamey Gambrell

Mariner Books, 256 pages, $15

Shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, Osip Mandelstam declared: "Russian history travels along the brink, along a ledge, over an abyss, and is on the verge of falling into nihilism at any moment." With Pushkin's Children, Tatyana Tolstaya renders the continued relevance of Mandelstam's judgment robustly clear. Even as Russia teeters through its most recent advance to the brink of chaos, this collection announces another Russian writer with impeccable literary ancestry and impressive cultural acumen, one highly qualified to denounce neatly simplistic views of her nation.

The 20 pieces that comprise Pushkin's Children cover a ten-year span, from 1990 to 2000. In most of them, Tolstaya's considerations of books on Russian history, politics, and culture act as springboards into her own ideas on these subjects. The power of the Russian matriarchy; the centuries-old practice of terror-driven, authoritarian rule; the end of communism and the post-Soviet era; twentieth-century poverty and economic chaos; the iron-fisted reigns of Stalin and Lenin; the eternal beauty of St. Petersburg; the centrality of food and vodka to the Russian soul and psyche: Tolstaya treats these recurrent themes in a gregarious style; her pages teem with Russian life felt and written about in a deeply charged way.

Tolstaya's method is to reveal the personal imprint on large-scale events, whether it be children blithely eating caviar like porridge during a currency crisis, or her niece complaining of Lenin's body in its mausoleum, "There's nothing to see. He's all yellow and dried up." Her reviews of books on or by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin allow her to stress the proximity of the private and political that she contends is as much a feature of Russian life as the distance between ambition and achievement. Considering Yeltsin's autobiography, The Struggle for Russia, Tolstaya provides the melancholy image of a befuddled man, angry that he cannot land the presidential helicopter to admire a pretty stream because, as an aide reminds him, the president must always be mindful of "the nuclear button" under his thumb.

Stronger feelings arise in essays on fellow writers. Tolstaya nearly deifies Joseph Brodsky in a remembrance--contradicting her general opposition to the Russian tendency to revere the nation's writers as prophets. She reverts to form ...