The Slynx

The Slynx is Tatyana Tolstaya's debut novel, set in a post-nuclear Russia centuries after an event simply called the Blast. The town of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk, named for its absolute ruler Fyodor Kuzmich, is a medieval settlement of peasants who eat mice, fear mutants called Degenerators, and live in terror of a mythical forest creature called the Slynx, said to reach down from tree branches and claw out a person's reason. The protagonist, Benedikt, works as a scribe copying out the pronouncements of Fyodor Kuzmich, who claims authorship of all literature ever written. The novel is a savage satire of Soviet cultural amnesia, intellectual repression, and the human appetite for authority, written in a deliberately archaic, folk-tale Russian that Jamey Gambrell's translation renders with considerable skill. Tolstaya, granddaughter of the writer Alexei Tolstoy and great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, worked on the novel for fourteen years before its Russian publication in 2000. First American edition.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. ISBN: 0618124977. #10589.
Tiny ding to foredge of pages, else fine in like dust jacket.