The Slynx »

Born in Leningrad, Tatyana Tolstaya comes from an old Russian family that includes the writers Leo and Alexei Tolstoy. She studied at Leningrad State University and then moved to Moscow, where she continues to live. She is also the author of Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians.

Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. Her translations include  Marina Tsvetaeva's Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917—1922 and Vladimir Sorokin's  Ice, published by NYRB Classics on December 2006.

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“A postmodern literary masterpiece.” –The Times Literary Supplement

Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he’s not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he’s happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he’s managed—at least so far—to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond.  

Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx reimagines dystopian fantasy as a wild, horripilating amusement park ride. Poised between Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, The Slynx is a brilliantly inventive and shimmeringly ambiguous work of art: an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia’s past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now.

The New Yorker

The hero of this spellbinding futuristic novel, a government scribe named Benedikt, lives in a primitive settlement on the site of Moscow, two hundred years after "the Blast." No one knows quite how the old world was destroyed; as Benedikt puts it, "People were playing around and played too hard with someone's arms." Citizens born after the Blast exist on a diet of mice and "worrums" and bear frightening mutations, or "Consequences" -- a tail, a single eye, a head covered with fringed red coxcombs. Other inhabitants, called Oldeners, haven't aged at all since the Blast, and harbor memories of a lost culture that go unheeded by their descendants. Tolstaya's radioactive world is a cunning blend of Russia's feudal and Soviet eras, with abuse of serfs, mandatory government service, and regulation of literature. The dangers that threaten, however, feel more contemporary: to the south, Chechens; and to the west a civilization that might hold some promise, except that its members "don't know anything about us."