Russian state and criticized plans of some Tatar politicians for extraterritorial autonomy in a unitary state. By the end of the year, Validov had emerged as primary leader of a small Bashkir nationalist movement that promulgated (in December 1917) an autonomous Bashkir republic based in Orenburg. Arrested by Soviet forces in February 1918, Validov escaped in April and joined the emerging anti-Bolshevik movement as full-scale civil war broke out that summer. Attempts to organize the Bashkir republic and separate Bashkir military forces under White auspices flagged, particularly after Admiral Kolchak took charge of the White movement. In February 1919 Validov and most of his colleagues defected to the Soviet side in return for the promise of complete Bashkir autonomy. However, sixteen months of increasingly frustrating collaboration with Soviet power ended in June 1920 when Validov departed to join the Basmachis in Central Asia, hoping to link the Bashkir search for autonomy to a larger movement for Turkic independence from Russian colonial rule. These hopes were dashed with Bas-machi defeat.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
After leaving Turkestan in 1923, Validov taught at Istanbul University in Turkey (1925-1932), where he adopted the surname Togan. He went on to earn a doctorate at the University of Vienna (1932-1935) and taught at Bonn and G?ttingen Universities (1935-1939). Togan returned to Istanbul University in 1939 and remained there until his death in 1970. Togan’s scholarly output was prodigious, with over four hundred publications, largely in Turkish and German, on the history of the Turkic peoples from antiquity to the twentieth century, including his own remarkable memoirs (Hatiralar). During these years of exile, Validov and Validovism (validovshchina) lived on in the Soviet lexicon as the epitome of reactionary Bashkir nationalism, and accusations of connection with Validov proved fatal for hundreds if not thousands of Bashkirs and other Muslims in Russia. Since the early 1990s Togan’s name has been rehabilitated in his homeland, where he is now recognized as the father of today’s Republic of Bashkortostan. See also: BASHKORTISTAN AND THE BASHKIRS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Paksoy, H. B. (1995). “Basmachi Movement from Within: Account of Zeki Velidi Togan.” Nationalities Papers 23:373-399. Schafer, Daniel E. (2001). “Local Politics and the Birth of the Republic of Bashkortostan, 1919-1920.” In A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Era of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin. New York: Oxford University Press.
(b. 1951), Russian writer.
Tolstaya is an original, captivating fiction writer of the perestroika and post-Soviet period. Born in 1951 in Leningrad, she graduated from Leningrad State University with a degree in Philology and Classics, then worked as an editor at Nauka before publishing her first short stories in the early 1980s. Their imaginative brilliance and humane depth won success with both Soviet and international readers. Her activities expanded subsequently to include university teaching (at Skidmore College, among other institutions), journalistic writing, and completion of a dark futuristic novel, The Slynx.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Tolstaya’s initial impact on Russian letters was made by a series of short stories centering on the conflict between imagination, spirit, and value, on the one hand, and a bleak social order of conformity and consumerism, cultural and spiritual degradation, and rapacious and cynical materialism on the other. Although she draws on the texture of late Soviet reality with witty, acerbic penetration, her critique of modern society travels well. The mythical dimensions of this conflict are highlighted in her stories by frequent use of fantastic elements and folkloric allusions, such as the transformation of the self-centered Serafim into Gorynych the Dragon (Serafim), or the bird of death, Sirin, symbolizing Petya’s loss of innocence in “Date with a Bird.”
Her most notable stories are works of virtuosic invention. Denisov of the Dantesque “Sleepwalker in the Mist” awakens in mid-life surrounded by dark woods and takes up the search for meaning; his various attempts at creation, leadership, and sacrifice ending in farce. Peters of “Peters” is a lumpish being without attraction or charm (one coworker calls him “some kind of endocrinal dodo”) who spends his life in quixotic search of romantic love; in old age, beaten down by humiliation, he triumphs by his praise of life: “indifferent, ungrateful, lying, teasing, senseless, alien-beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.” Sonia of “Sonia” is a halfwitted, unattractive, but selfless creature, tormented by her sophisticated friends through the fiction of a married admirer, Nikolai, whom she can never meet. The fabrication is kept up through years of correspondence in which the chief tormentor, Ada, finds her womanhood irresistibly subverted. In the Leningrad blockade Sonia gives her life to save Ada/Nikolai, without realizing the fiction.
The fantastic elements in Tolstaya’s works have led to comparisons with the magical realism of modern Latin American fiction, comparisons which are only roughly valid. The association of Tolstaya’s work with the women’s prose (zhen-skaya proza) of late Soviet literature also requires qualification: although women are frequently protagonists in her stories as impaired visionaries and saints, they are just as often the objects of bitter satire, implacable enforcers of social conventionality.
Tolstaya’s remarkable novel The Slynx depicts a post-nuclear Moscow populated by mutants, combining the political traits of the Tatar Yoke and Muscovite Russia with characteristics of Stalinist
1555
and later Soviet regimes. The narrative, displaying to advantage Tolstaya’s humor and ear for popular language, presents a negative Bildungsroman. The uncouth but decent and robust protagonist, Benedikt, given favorable circumstances including a library, leisure to read, and friends from the earlier times, fails to develop and cross the line from animal existence to spiritual, and as a consequence the culture itself fails to regain organic life. This pessimistic historical vision seems rooted in the disappointments of post-Soviet Russian political and social life. See also: PERESTROIKA
Goscilo, Helena. (1996). The Explosive World of Ta.tya.na N. Tolstaya’s Fiction. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Tolstaya, Tatiana. (1989). On the Golden Porch, tr. An-tonina W. Bouis. New York: Knopf. Tolstaya, Tatiana. (1992). Sleepwalker in a Fog, tr. Jamey Gambrell. New York: Knopf. Tolstaya, Tatiana. (2003). Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians, tr. Jamey Gambrell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Tolstaya, Tatiana. (2003). The Slynx, tr. Jamey Gambrell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
HAROLD D. BAKER
Russian State, from which he lifted passages verbatim for his own work.
Tolstoy’s lyric poetry, most notably “Against the Current” (1867) and “John Damascene” (1858), were strongly influenced by German romanticism. He also wrote satirical verse. Collaborating with the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, he created the fictional writer Kozma Prutkov, a petty bureaucrat who parodied the poetry of the day and wrote banal aphorisms. Karamzin’s History also served as the inspiration for Tolstoy’s History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev, a parody of Russian history from its founding until 1868, which contained vicious characteristics of the Russian monarch. The manuscript circulated privately between 1868, when it was completed, and 1883, when it first appeared in print. See also: KARAMZIN, NIKOLAI MIKHAILOVICH
Bartlett, Rosamund. (1998). “Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoi 1817-1875.” In Reference Guide to Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell, 806-808. London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Dalton, Margaret. (1972). A. K. Tolstoy. New York: Twayne.
ELIZABETH JONES HEMENWAY
(1817-1875), writer of drama, fiction, and poetry; considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist.
