On The Golden Porch

Poetic, magical and piercingly funny, this is a stunning debut from the most remarkable new writer to emerge from the Soviet Union since the war. With lyricism and zest, Tatyana Tolstaya evokes the longings, fears and romance in all human encounters, from childhood to old age. A small boy, Petya, at his summer dacha, dreams of marriage to the louche, mysterious Tamila as she smokes and drinks on her veranda in a black kimono…
Vladimir will only leave his toothbrush at Zoya’s flat while she pines for his shirts to make themselves comfortable in her cupboards… Balding Simeonov falls in love with the festooned orchid of Vera Vasilevna’s voice, ‘divine, low, dark, lacey’, on his old cracked records as he eats processed cheese and pictures her walking on the banks of the Okkervil river in the high heels of his imagination… Sweet Shura, an old woman with pre-revolutionary legs, recalls her three husbands and the lover she left waiting at a railway station until the stars came out…
Men and women fall in love, but rarely want the same things. Souls escape from tea-cosies and table-cloths, slithering snake-like out through napkin rings. These are the characters of Tolstaya’s extraordinary imagination: people who refuse to grow wise or relinquish the poetry of their souls, into whose hearts we are allowed a captivating glance.
Tatyana Tolstaya, a relative of Leo Tolstoy and granddaughter of Alexei Tolstoy, was born in 1951. She began writing five years ago, after working for years in a Moscow publishing house.
On publication of ON THE GOLDEN PORCH in the Soviet Union in 1987 the entire first edition of the book sold out of the Soviet bookshops in under an hour. Tatyana Tolstaya lives in Moscow with her husband and two sons.