Tolstaya burst upon the Russian literary scene in 1987 when, according to S. Dalton-Brown in Reference Guide to Russian Literature, her first collection of stories, On the Golden Porch, sold out within one hour. Though Tolstaya has a limited body of published work, Dalton-Brown writes that many critics view her as the pre eminent Russian short-story writer today, showing "an extraordinarily high degree of craftsmanship." The American reception of her first collection in 1989 was enthusiastic, as was the response to the 1991 publication of Sleepwalker in a Fog, which includes the story "Night." Critics have favorably compared Tolstaya to other Russian writers as disparate as Vladimir Nabokov, Sasha Sokolov, Anton Chekhov, and Nikolai Gogol, to name but a few.

Anita Desai, writing for The New Republic, calls Sleepwalker in a Fog a "gorgeous, intricate, wildly rampaging Russian garden in summer bloom," although she considers "Night" one of the...