Aleksei Tolstoi Biography and List of Works

Novelist, playwright, historian, and short story writer, a former nobleman who immigrated to western Europe after the Bolshevik Revolution. Tolstoi returned to Russia in 1923, where he became a supporter of the Communist Party and honoured artist receiving three Stalin Prizes. The Nobel writer Romain Rolland admired the power of Tolstoi's novels and wrote to the author:

"What particularly impresses me about your strong and truthful art is the way you mould your personages in their particular surroundings. They seem to constitute an inalienable part of the air, earth, and light which surround and nourish them, and you have the knack of expressing the finest tints of the environment with one stroke of the brush."

Aleksei Tolstoi was born in Nikolaevsk (now Pugachyov), in Samara Province, into an aristocratic family distantly related to Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev. He grew up without knowing his real father, Count Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tolstoi, who was a member of the elite of Russian society and a wealthy landowner. His mother had left her husband and three children, and moved with Aleksei's stepfather, Aleksei Apollonovich Bostrom, to a farm in the Samara region.

Until the age of 13, Tolstoi was educated at home, then at a secondary school in Samara (1894-1901), and at St. Petersburg Technological Institute (1901-08). His first literary experiments were born under the influence of the Symbolist movement. Among his early works were some realistic short stories depicting his childhood. As a writer Tolstoi made his breakthrough with a series of novels exploring the historical process of the impoverishment of the nobility's country estates and the spiritual decline of their owners.

Between the years 1914 and 1916 Tolstoi served as a war correspondent for the newspaper Russkie vedomosti, and sided with the Whites. He made several visits to the Front line, and travelled in France and England. In 1917 Tolstoi worked for General Denikin's propaganda section. Unable to accept the Russian Revolution, he emigrated the following year with his family to Paris. A few years later he moved to Berlin where he became the editor of the Bolshevik newspaper Nakanune. Following a change in his political beliefs, Tolstoi broke with the émigré circles and returned to the Soviet Union.

After an uneasy period, when he was suspected because of his aristocratic origins, Tolstoi established himself among the leading Soviet writers. During the 1920s Tolstoi wrote several plays, including adaptations of works by Eugene O'Neill and Carel Capek. He participated in the anti-fascist congress in Paris and London in 1935-36 and took part in the 2nd International Congress of Writers in Madrid during the Spanish Civil war (1936). In 1936 he was elected Chairman of the Writer's Union and a deputy to the Supreme Soviet in 1937. Two years later he was elected member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Tolstoi died in Moscow on February 23, 1945.

Tolstoi's major works include Nikita's Childhood (1922), a lyrical story of a childhood in a Russian village that incorporates autobiographical elements, and Road to Cavalry (1920-1942), a trilogy about the life of four people, sisters Dasha and Katia, and Telgin and Roshchin, from the eve of World War I to end of the Russian Civil War. Tolstoi's novel covers the same period as Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don (1928-40), but from the viewpoint of the progressive intelligentsia. Peter the First (1929-45) is a historical novel, which made a strong comeback in the 1930s. It upholds the myth of Peter the Great as a progressive ruler who made Russia strong, while also having a heart for the people.

"When a man's at war and constantly facing death he rises above his ordinary self. All the trashy stuff that doesn't matter peels off him, like dead skin after sunburn, and only the kernel, the real man, is left."
(from 'The Russian Character', 1944)

Among Tolstoi's political novels are Chornoe zoloto (1932), which paints uncharitable caricatures of Russian émigrés, and Khleb (1937), in which history is shamelessly falsified to laud Stalin and denigrate Trotsky. In his last plays, Oryol i orlitsa (1942) and Trudnye gody (1943) Tolstoi idealizes Ivan the Terrible and then draws parallels between him and Stalin - an idea that the film director Sergei Eisenstein used in his monumental film production, Ivan the Terrible (1945-46). Stalin especially disliked the second instalment, although the first part won a Stalin Prize.

Tolstoi also published two science fiction novels, both of which appeared in the 1920s and which were revised during the following decades of Stalinist terror. Aelita (1923) is a science-fiction fantasy in the manner of H.G. Wells, telling the story of a Soviet expedition to Mars with the aim of establishing communism. A Red Army officer ferments a rebellion among the native Martians, who are in fact long-ago emigrants from Atlantis. The story was adapted into screen in 1924. Isaac Rabinovitch of the Kamerny Theatre designed its futuristic, Expressionistic sets. The film influenced the design of Flash Gordon, a space opera, which was created by the artist Alex Raymond in 1934 and led to a popular radio serial and several films. Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (1926, The Death Box) describes an attempt by an unscrupulous inventor to use his death ray to conquer the world. He manages to rule a decadently capitalist USA for a short period.

For further reading: Alexei Tolstoy by W. Stscherbina (1954); Aleksei Tolstoi - master istoricheskogo romana by A.V. Alpatov (1958); Aleksei Tolstoi - khudozhnik by L.M. Poliak (1964); Soviet Russian Literature by Marc Slonim (1967, rev. 1977); Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin by Gleb Stuve (1972); Aleksei Tolstoi by V. Petelin (1978); The Images of Peter the Great in Russian Literature by Xenia Gasiorawska (1979); Aleksei Tolstoi by Sergei Borovikov (1984); A.N. Tolstoi, ed. by I.E. Kharitonov (1990); A.N. Tolstoi: Novye materialy i issledovaniia (1995) - Note: Aleksei Nikolayevich Tolstoi is not to be confused with Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875), who was also a writer.

LIRIKA, (1907)