In his Siberian Dawn: A Journey across the New Russia, Jeffrey Taylor recounts the eight-thousand-mile trip he took in 1993 from Siberia to Poland as a young man with a huge sense of adventure but very little money. The memoir, published in 1999, gives an up-close and personal account of post-communist Soviet states not long after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Nabokov is one of the modern Russian authors Tolstaya mentions as an influence on her writing. The sixty-five stories collected in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1995, were written by Nabokov between the early 1920s and the mid-1950s. He is best known to American audiences for his controversial novel Lolita.

Many critics acknowledge the similarities between Tolstaya and another young Russian author, Sasha Sokolov. In 1988, Sokolov published A School for Fools, a novel about childhood and adult...