At the Tolstoy Museum is a short story by Donald Barthelme. It was first published in The New Yorker in 1969. It is an unconventional narrative about a fictional museum dedicated to Leo Tolstoy. The narrator describes the museum’s vast collection of Tolstoy paintings and monuments while describing the effects that the museum has on the visitors. This surrealistic story explores themes of morality and idolization.
Donald Barthelme has achieved his present eminence as one of the leading popular innovators in American fiction through the pages of the New Yorker magazine, where he began publishing in 1963. But, al...
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Two years after Donald Barthelme's death, his friend Robert Coover observed that his name had achieved a new currency as an adjective: the term "Barthelmesque," Coover wrote, refers not only to a styl...
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Donald Barthelme