Tolstaya is divinely quotable—slangy, indignant, lyrical, crude. She picks you up—you’re light as a feather—and carries you along. You’re blown this way and that, cuddled and cast down, mocked and treasured. You don’t know where you’re going. None of it makes a lick of sense. It’s all detritus. It’s all sublime. The important becomes unimportant ... It is difficult to convey the gaiety and breadth of Tolstaya’s witchy craft.
Tolstaya is well known in Russia as a brilliant and caustic political critic, but her memories of her Soviet childhood have a tender, personal quality, devoid of any ideological ax-grinding ... Tolstaya is doubly haunted by the past, both by its lostness and by its stubborn refusal to go away. She is blessed, and cursed, with the mystic’s gift of seeing the shades of the departed ... Although this is Tolstaya’s first book to be translated into English in 10 years, it could not be said of Aetherial Worlds that it is all killer, no filler...But it’s more than worth sifting through a little dross for the pleasure of seeing the world through the corrective lens of Tolstaya’s vision, which reveals the world as not just a dull accretion of matter but a complex and shifting system of real and unreal realms, populated by beings both visible and invisible, floodlit by flashes of transcendence.
...a collection of dark, funny folkloric tales. Each is masterful in its ability to keep apace with the world’s banalities and frustrations while moving seamlessly into the surreal ... Tolstaya’s conscious aversion to sentimentality makes you feel as if you alone are catching a glimpse into the secretly vulnerable and deeply captivating souls of her characters.
Aetherial Worlds, in a high-spirited translation by Anya Migdal, is playful and poetic, with a lightness that verges on flippancy. Even when Ms. Tolstaya writes about adulthood her setting is the world of children, which outwardly resembles ordinary life yet is touched by fantasies, ghosts and magic ... Mingling memoir with flights of fancy, many of the stories follow Ms. Tolstaya’s extended travels to the U.S., France and Italy ... A sense of permanent impermanence, both forlorn and liberating, inflects her reveries, and never is Ms. Tolstaya more luxuriantly homesick than when she recalls her childhood
Simple but essential, this piece of writing feeds people. If aspic inspires such language, why does it matter whether the cook is Tolstaya or a character she created? ... Tolstaya’s writings provide no absolutes, just a window between worlds.
The best of Tolstaya’s stories trace that intersection of imagination and memory, where the two become something greater by not being merely one or the other ... Tolstaya quotes Kipling: 'When your demon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.' The strength of her stories comes from fidelity to that call. Real, imaginary—why worry the difference? Your demon can figure out the rules later ... My powers of second sight are still a work in progress, but these stories make you worry about—or thrill to—what would happen if you started to see too much.
Praised by Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) as 'the most original, tactile, luminous voice in Russian prose,' Tolstaya, two decades on, is all that and more in this edgy, brash, slyly surreal, and mordantly funny short story collection, which begins with the sudden awakening of a woman’s literary imagination, an inherited gift ... Tolstaya’s daring, masterful stories, crisply translated, glint and whirl with extraordinary dimension and force.
What makes this collection of short stories different is how these stories merge commentary on the past and the present through a variety of styles and forms: auto-fiction, essayistic pieces, and allegorical tales. Due to this, they may not be to every reader's tastes. Yet many themes are deeply investigated: identity, living, dying, loss, loneliness, politics, love, dislocation, the Russian psyche, and more. If further unity is sought, it can be found only in the authorial voice ... Given the wide-ranging prose forms and styles of this collection, Midgal has pulled off a highly admirable feat in maintaining the integrity and rhythm of the author's voice.
Tolstaya has patented a smart, cool, funny voice, at times touching lightly, at others gaining amplitude and darkness. There’s something brilliantly Russian about her work, as well there might be, considering her heritage. (Her grandfather is the science fiction writer Aleksey Tolstoy, and her great-uncle is Leo Tolstoy.) Tolstaya’s stories live at the intersection of fantasy and reality, with an irrational and playful edge that is distinctly her own ... Each of Tolstaya’s stories comes around to a revelation of multiple, co-existing realities. The imaginary world she discovers after her eye operation is nourishing and robust.
Fans of the austere and detailed writing of Chekhov, Gogol, and Tolstoy will feel right at home while reading Tolstaya’s eighteen stories ... There are places in the text that feel a bit off, as though the translation from Russian to English resulted in some lost nuances. But, if you’re looking for an engaging, thought-provoking collection of stories that will feel both foreign and familiar, Aetherial Worlds is the book for you.
These uniformly masterful stories from Tolstaya (The Slynx) reject any attempt at easy categorization, resulting in a profound, surprising, and rich experience ... While the works blend fantasy and fact, often within the same story, what unites them all is Tolstaya’s singular and assured voice, capable of beautiful specificity...and of surveying history from above and proclaiming, matter-of-factly, that 'autocracy is basically self-explanatory.'
A poet of silences and small gestures, Tolstaya often writes of love, if sometimes love that has gone off the rails because one or the other of the partners is either not listening or asking the wrong questions ... Elegant, lyrical tales woven with melancholy and world-weariness—but also with a curious optimism. A gem.
