SLEEPWALKER IN A FOG

SLEEPWALKER IN A FOG Tatyana Tolstaya; translated by Jamey Gambrell (Knopf, $19) The Soviet Union disintegrates; the ruble plummets. But the Russian language, ''so powerful and poisonous and yet loving and lithe,'' thrives in Tolstaya's stories. Her subjects (as in the earlier collection On the Golden Porch) are loneliness, death, and oblivion. She defines them with a prose that is invigorating, precise, poetic, and animistic. Here's a shabby communal apartment: ''Over the exit, rising like a plague cemetery up in arms, the black skulls of electric meters huddled together; as night fell the white stripes of their teeth, each row marked by a single bloody tooth, began madly spinning to the right.'' The title story fuses Russia's bitter past and chaotic present. A man in mid-life dreams of forgotten ancestors, plans a monument, and winds up involved in a humiliating barter for china cabinets. A Gogolian mini- masterpiece from a distant relative of Count Leo Tolstoy. A -SR