A Literary Heiress : Author: A distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, Russian short-story writer Tatyana Tolstaya says writing is in her blood. Critics say her work follows in the tradition of Gogol and praise it for its satire and surrealism.

“One day when I was very little,” says Tatyana Tolstaya, “strangers came to my playground in St. Petersburg. They were dressed in fancy costumes and I’ll always remember it. They walked around on stilts, so high they were like trees.”

The woman who is arguably Russia’s foremost writer of short stories stops for a moment, transported back to childhood.

She says the memory lay submerged until years later, when she asked her father the most absurd excuse the Stalinist police ever gave for hauling a citizen off to prison.

“Stilts,” her father replied. “They arrested some people in a park for walking on stilts. Charged them with public vulgarity.”

This anecdote hasn’t yet made it into any of Tolstaya’s stories, but it’s the kind of surreal image the 40-year-old writer might use to illustrate both the pathos and beauty she sees in everyday Russian life.

Tolstaya, in Newark to speak at a literary conference at Rutgers University, currently works in the United States. She writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Republic and the Wilson Quarterly as well as Russian publications.

She teaches Russian literature at Goucher College in Baltimore while her husband Andrei Lebedev teaches classics at Johns Hopkins University. This fall, they will move to Princeton University, where Tolstaya will teach creative writing.

As the granddaughter of Count Alexei Tolstoy and a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, two of Russia’s great novelists, writing, she says, is in her blood.

“Some of my stories are about real people,” Tolstaya says. “It’s funny how when you try to be very accurate, it’s boring and there’s nothing there. But when you distort the reality, it comes back stronger than before and is often closer to the truth.”

In the title story of Tolstaya’s new book “Sleepwalker in a Fog,” there is Denisov, whose only claim to immortality is a treatise he wrote and tore up explaining why Australia doesn’t exist. From the safety of his sofa, Denisov yearns for fame but knows that “everything had already been discovered, enumerated, denominated; everything alive and dead, from cockroaches to comets, from cheese mold to the spiral arms of abstruse nebulae.”

Denisov’s girlfriend Lora dreams of having a tail. “Think about it . . . Wouldn’t it be pretty--a thick fluffy tail . . . It would be convenient. In the Metro you could hold on to the straps with it; if it’s too hot--you’ve got a fan; and if someone gets fresh--slap him with your tail!”

Tolstaya made her American debut in 1989 with “On the Golden Porch.” The West was enchanted with all things Russian then, but praise for Tolstaya’s writing transcended flavor-of-the-month. “The blazing vitality of Ms. Tolstaya’s imagination, the high-spirited playfulness . . . place her in that uniquely Russian line of satirists and surrealists,” said the New York Times Book Review.

“She’s simply one of the very best writers working now, male or female,” says Ellendea Proffer, a literary critic and owner of Ardis, a Michigan-based publishing house that brings out many Russian works.

“This exuberance I’ve never seen in anyone else. She ascends like a rocket and floats. Where someone else would see gray drabness, she sees fantastic possibility. When she came, it was like we had had black and white movies and now we had Technicolor.”

Tolstaya appears to be living proof of Leo Tolstoy’s claim that every happy family is happy in the same way. She has fond recollections of her Leningrad childhood in a large, intensely literary, cultured and boisterous clan, several of whom are now deputies in the post-Soviet Union Russian Parliament.

Her father was a physicist, her mother a professor of English who quit to raise seven children.

“Everything to them is interesting and that’s the key to Tatyana,” Proffer says. “She doesn’t strike me as a product of her time, especially in Russia where conditions haven’t been ripe to reward such imagination.”

The Tolstoys lived a bit better than most, thanks to a bit of money left to her family by Alexei Tolstoy, her aristocratic and talented grandfather, who wrote respected books as well as a historically distorted novel praising Stalin.

Tolstaya says she has no moral right to condemn decisions made under a terrorist regime that perverted normal life. “They had a choice: Obey or die,” she says.

Her immediate family was not affected by Stalin’s purges, Tolstaya says, but “a lot of friends around my parents suffered. I was always aware of that.”

Tolstaya calls her great-uncle Leo Tolstoy a great writer, but an unbearable human being. “When I read him, sometimes I want to jump from anger,” she says. “He was the torturer of the family, so Old Testament. He didn’t allow his young children to play with toys. His attitude toward women was that they should stay at home. His wife rewrote ‘War and Peace’ six times by hand and gave birth to 13 children.”

Tolstaya, who met her husband while earning a degree in classics, has two children. The family settled in Moscow where Tolstaya held uninspiring jobs in publishing. At that time, she couldn’t imagine being a writer and was intimidated at the possibility of comparison to her famous relatives.

“When everyone in your family is a writer, when it’s done at such a level, you don’t think of doing that, you don’t want to do your job poorly,” she says.

The catalyst came in 1983, after an eye operation kept her from reading for three months.

After recuperating, Tolstaya picked up books, but they held little interest. Then she realized she had to write her own stories. When the first, “Loves Me, Loves Me Not” was published in 1983 by a small but influential literary magazine, critics said a major new voice had arrived.

Tolstaya published short stories in Novy Mir and other Soviet magazines. In 1988, the Russian edition of “On the Golden Porch” proved so popular that all 50,000 copies printed disappeared from Moscow within hours.

But glasnost brought chances to travel abroad. In 1988, she visited New York and spent the fall as a writer-in-residence in Richmond, Va. In 1989, she spent a semester at Texas A & M University.

Tolstaya returns home each summer and doesn’t consider herself a professional emigre. “My mental landscape is definitely Russian,” she says. “I need to feel the chaos from time to time. I can’t enjoy American culture. The more comfort you have the less you feel it. But, Russia is constant discomfort and when everyone’s in the same discomfort, there’s some kind of solidarity.”

But even for someone with a vivid imagination, Tolstaya admits these are trying times for Russian literature. “It’s been so interesting to look around and see what’s happening that it was difficult to write. People are so torn apart from each other. They’ve lost that common language. Who is your audience?

“It was easy at a certain point when it was just we and they. But now, we are they and it’s very difficult to live without that enemy at the top,” she adds.

For Tolstaya, writing is liberation. “It gives you the feeling of very special power,” she says. “You’re safe and secure and that’s one reason the tyrants of the world hated poets, because they couldn’t seize the words.”