Collection of cranberries in Canada. Tolstoy E.D.

“The collection of cranberries in Canada can be considered as a kind of story. The third-person (from the shoulder of a fictitious heroine) is oscillating between a biographical narrative and a frank fiction. The spirit of anachronism reigns here, and recognizable faces and situations intertwine with fictional.

The book is composed of miniatures: childhood in Leningrad of the fifties, which has passed under the sign of (alien) nostalgia, various Moscow educational institutions and avant -garde forebodings of the sixties, the realities of emigration, the intersperses of documentaries like other people's oral memoirs or newspaper announcements, and even reasoning , and sometimes parodies on literary or academic topics. The author’s interest is focused on elusive cultural details that give an unforgettable taste of any era. Elena Tolstoy’s prose recalls modernist ornamental, and paradoxical wit helps maintain a certain distance in relation to what seems to be autobiographical experience and consider it a critical look. But her linguistic game does not become an end in itself: a sincere tone is preserved even in the most stylistically complicated places of the book.

Elena Tolstaya - the granddaughter of the writer Alexei Tolstoy and the poetess Natalia Krandievskaya, the daughter of the harpist of Nadezhda Tolstoy and composer Dmitry Tolstoy. The author of the books “Keys of Happiness: Alexey Tolstoy and Literary Petersburg”, “Game of Classics” and a collection of stories “Western-East sofa-bed”.