Though a controversial figure in her own country, during the second half of the 1980s Tatyana Tolstaya impressed Western readers as the uncontested premier Russian prosaist of a new era. For many, both her rhetorically exuberant, apolitical stories and her opinionated outspokenness in speeches on any and all topics during visits to the United States--delivered, moreover, in English--epitomized the policy of glasnost instituted by Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev (who was general secretary of the Communist Party from 1985 to 1991). Until her debut as a novelist in 2000, Tolstaya's fiction consisted of twenty-one short narratives--published between 1983 and 1991, immediately translated into approximately a dozen languages, and read by academics, fellow authors, and general readers throughout the world. This relatively small corpus rapidly secured Tolstaya the international reputation she still enjoys, in a cultural atmosphere inconceivably remote from the expectant euphoria of perestroika. While she has ascribed her accelerated success largely to timing, the...