Pereți albi

Pereți albi tells of people whom hard lives have scarred. Its 27 stories follow orphans and people who have lost love. Some thinkers feel drawn to things that make no sense. Other people have simple minds. Some write poems at night and sweep streets by day.

This book gives the broadest view of Tatiana Tolstaia’s short fiction. She views her characters with both irony and care. At times, her stories take the form of old fairy tales. Things from fantasy enter daily life. They show us people whom others fail to see.

Tolstaia’s life began in 1951 in Saint Petersburg. At that time, the city’s name was Leningrad. Lev and Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi were writers in her family. She studied classical languages at Saint Petersburg State University. She then spent several years working for a Moscow publisher. Her work first came out in print in the mid-1980s.