This study of the work of Tatyana N. Tolstaya initiates the reader into the paradoxes of her fictional universe: a poetic realm ruled by language, to which the mysteries of life, imagination, memory and death are subject.

Introduction; Chapter 1 Paradise, Purgatory, and Post-Mortems: The Lapsarian Myth as Universal Rite of Passage; Chapter 2 Language and the Soul's Dark Night in Childhood; Chapter 3 Tolstayan Love as Surface Text; Chapter 4 The Eternal Feminine's Liebestod Transposed to Baser Clef; Chapter 5 Monsters Monomaniacal, Marital, and Medical: Tolstaya's Regenerative Use of Gender Stereotypes; Chapter 6 Perspective in Tolstaya's Wonderland of Art; Chapter 7 Fantasy and Fatality: Narrative as Creative and Killing Strategy; Chapter 8 Tolstayan Times: Traversals and Transfers; Chapter 9 Tolstayan Tropes: Perils, Pleasures, and Epiphanies; Postscript;