In the Russian Tradition : SLEEPWALKER IN A FOG, <i> By Tatyana Tolstaya translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell (Alfred A. Knopf: $19; 192 pp.)</i>

This collection of eight short stories surely must serve as a dash--or an exclamation point--in the convoluted sentence of contemporary Russian history. Tatyana Tolstaya is the great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy and the granddaughter of Alexei Tolstoy. She graduated from Leningrad University. She has taught in the United States at the University of Richmond and the University of Texas. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. Now that the Russians get to have a society divided up by classes again, Tatyana Tolstaya can safely be said to be top-drawer.

The time-honored themes of Russo-European literature are here once again taken out, unfolded, held up against a weak winter’s sun, like some grandmother’s threadbare (but beautifully embroidered) old linen.

In “The Moon Came Out,” a 50-year-old woman, Natasha, has lived her whole life in loneliness because she has “a fat, porous face, an eggplant nose, a dejected chest, and short, bulging bicycle calves.” Not only that, when Natasha hits adolescence and realizes that human beings have a tendency to procreate, she suffers through emotional hell: “People walked around up to the waist in filth, they concealed stench and open sores under their clothes, and all of them thought of only one thing. And with a shudder, suspecting her own unclean, female animal nature, Natasha felt attacked night and day by a foul wind blowing and blowing from below at her gut, at her unprotected depths.”

It’s appropriate that Tatyana Tolstaya be identified in her biography by her relatives. The spirit of her great-granduncle is alive and well in these stories. For women, the worst thing that can possibly happen is to be ugly and unloved. The second worst thing is to be beset by an “animal” nature. But the third worst thing is not to be beset by an animal nature. On the other hand, if you’re a man, the worst thing you can do is not to love at all, to give yourself up to theory and idealism at the expense of your humanity. In “Serafim,” a man/angel lives alone in one of those desolate Russian flats, trying to remain clean and pure in every way, hating everything and everybody, disgusted by panting dogs and pork roasts, anything fat and breathing and alive, always getting his wings crushed by his fellow bus passengers, always shuddering away from anything human. He plans, in the near future, to fly up to take his place in the stars: “A shining, sexless body, he would glide in silvery raiment through the resonant heights, let the streaming cold of constellations run between his fingers, dive into ethereal currents.”

The point in these stories is, in a sense, their timelessness. With the exception of a motorized bus or two, they could have been written in the 19th Century. And, quite probably, someone will be writing in this same manner, and about these “Russian” things, a hundred years from now. There is even a line or two in one of these stories where someone’s wallpaper refuses to stick to the wall, and insects rustle around underneath. Reading these pages brings back all of Dostoevski, where wallpaper never sticks to the wall, and insects always rustle around underneath, and neurasthenic heroes take to their narrow beds and sip sturgeon soup for their health.

Art, in this mind-set, demands chaos and decay and chain-smoking. In “The Poet and the Muse,” a female doctor (“a marvelous woman,” the author sardonically observes) falls madly in love with an irresponsible poet who hangs out happily with a Russian demimonde, “an old man with a guitar; teenage poets; actors who turned out to be chauffeurs and chauffeurs who turned out to be actors; a demobilized ballerina who was always crying, ‘Hey, I’ll call our gang over, too’; ladies in diamonds; unlicensed jewelers; unattached girls with spiritual aspirations in their eyes; philosophers with unfinished dissertations; a deacon from Novorossisk who always brought a suitcase full of salted fish; and a Tungus from eastern Siberia who . . . would only ingest some kind of fat, which he ate out of a jar with his fingers.”

Naturally, when the female doctor takes her beloved poet away from his dubious companions, his poetic genius withers. But--in both literary and literal terms--how did all those dubious types get there in the first place? Wasn’t Russia--and all those Soviet republics--having a well-advertised totalitarian regime over there until just a few months ago? Can it be that “communism” as we have been led to perceive it was a chimera, a mirage, a non-event, all along?

These elegant, overwritten, aristocratic, sometimes mystical tales are everything that communism supposedly was not. And these stories were there, these perceptions were there, this mind-set was there all the time! Spooky.

They’ve brought back the lacy, witty, learned literature, and the priests have come out of hiding. If the new heads of all those newly independent members of the Commonwealth of Independent States start rummaging around in cupboards for dusty jeweled crowns, we ought not be surprised. Because under that Red Menace we’ve heard so much about, White Russia must have been there--like a “Sleepwalker in a Fog”--all the time.