Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (; – 23 February 1945) was a Russian and Soviet writer whose works span across many genres, but mainly belonged to science fiction and historical fiction.

Despite having opposed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, he was able to return to Russia six years later and live a privileged life as a highly paid author, reputedly a millionaire, who adapted his writings to conform to the line laid down by the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

Life and career

Parentage

Tolstoy's mother Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva (1854–1906) was a grand-niece of Nikolay Turgenev, who had been a Decembrist, and a relative of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. She married Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoy (1849–1900), a member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family and a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy.

Aleksey claimed that Count Tolstoy was his biological father, which allowed him to style himself as a Count; since his mother had taken a lover and left her husband before he was born, not all of his contemporaries believed him. The Nobel Prize winning author Ivan Bunin, who knew him as a young man, wrote in his diary, on 23 February 1953: "Aldanov said that Alyosha Tolstoy himself told him that he, T., bore the surname Bostrom until the age of 16 and then went to see his imaginary father, Count Nick Tolstoy, and begged to legitimize him." According to author and historian Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative:

thumb|right|160px|Alexandra Leontyevna Tolstaya, Aleksey's mother

What is known is that Bostrom brought the boy up as his own child, on his family farm in Samara province, and that he was known in his childhood and in his teens as Aleksey Bostrom. When he was 13, his mother began a lawsuit to have him recognized as the son of Count Tolstoy, which eventually he was on his 17th birthday, after which he was entitled to style himself as Count Tolstoy.

Early life

Tolstoy's adoptive father was a liberal landowner, who had supported the emancipation of Russian serfs in the 1860s.

In Dresden, he met Sofia Dymshitz (1889–1963), who had recently married another emigre student named Isaac Rosenfeld (1879-1978). She and Tolstoy became lovers, and returned to rent a shared apartment in St. Petersburg, where she took up painting. Her sister in law, Bella Rosenfeld, married Marc Chagall. Tolstoy's wife agreed to a divorce, which was finalised in 1910, but Rosenfeld always refused to divorce Dymshitz. Tolstoy's first book of poems, Lyric, was published in 1907, at his own expense, but in later life he was embarrassed by it and preferred to forget it. His second poetry collection, Beyond the Blue Rivers (1908) was his last. In a letter to his adoptive father, he complained that the name Tolstoy meant that people had high expectations of him, though Voloshin suggested to him that it was an advantage.

In 1908, he learnt from his ex-wife that their son had died from meningitis. According to Nikolai Tolstoy,

Return to Russia

Aleksey and Sophia returned to St. Petersburg in January 1909.

Tolstoy hoped to marry Kandaurova, but she rejected him,

By 1921, Tolstoy was bothered by the Gallicisms appearing in his son's spoken Russian language. Declaring that his son was becoming a foreigner, Aleksey moved the family to Berlin, which was then one of the main centers of the Russian diaspora. There, he wrote his science fiction novel, Aelita, and became associated with the 'Changing Landmarks' (Смена вех) group whose leading thinker was Nikolai Ustryalov, who were also known National Bolsheviks, because, despite their opposition to communism, they acknowledged that the Bolsheviks had united Russia. While there, he eventually began collaborating with Maxim Gorky on the pro-Soviet journal Nakanune. Ilya Ehrenburg later recalled:

Soviet dignitary

Tolstoy revisited Russia in May 1923, and decided to return permanently, having decided that "no literature will come out of the emigration". In his farewell editorial printed in Nakanune, he wrote, "I am leaving with my family for the homeland forever. If there are people here abroad close to me, my words are addressed to them. Do I go to happiness? Oh, no: Russia is going through hard times. Once again she is enveloped by a wave of hatred... I am going home to a hard life."

Because of his ancestry he was sometimes called "Comrade Count" or "Red Count".

Far from experiencing a "hard life" in the Soviet Union, Tolstoy was a highly privileged Soviet citizen, who prospered under the dictator, Joseph Stalin, when other writers who had chosen to live under Soviet rule throughout the civil war were persecuted. According to a widespread rumour, he was a millionaire with a "bottomless bank account". The American journalist Eugene Lyons noted how "almost alone among Russians, Tolstoy lived in baronial style in a rambling many-roomed mansion stocked with rich antiques ... the whole atmosphere of ripe old-world culture seemed like a throw-back to a nearly forgotten period." Anna Akhmatova paid a back-handed tribute to his ability to live well in a short poem written in the 1920s, which included the lines:

<poem>Ah, where are those islands

...

Where the villain Yagoda

Would not drive people to the wall

and Alyoshka Tolstoy

Would not skim it all.</poem>

If Tolstoy was aware that she had linked his name with that of the reviled head of the NKVD, he did not bear a grudge. In 1940, he and Mikhail Sholokhov proposed that Akhmatova be awarded a Stalin Prize, which would have been her first official recognition by the Soviet literary establishment, but the proposal was vetoed by Stalin.

Soviet critics abruptly changed their view of Tolstoy's work once he had declared his new allegiance to the regime. Instead of being denounced in Krasnaya nov, he had more work published in that magazine during the 1920s than any other author apart from Maxim Gorky, starting with Aelita. A critic writing in the same magazine praised The Road to Calvary as the best novel ever written by an emigre Russian.

When Nadezhda Mandelstam published her memoirs in the 1960s, she opened with this enigmatic sentence: "After slapping Alexei Tolstoy in the face, M. immediately returned to Moscow." She did not explain why her husband, Osip Mandelstam struck Tolstoy, but makes it clear that Tolstoy was so well connected with the Soviet authorities that Mandelstam fled Leningrad because he was afraid that he would be arrested. According to other sources, Tolstoy had chaired a writers' 'court of honour' which looked into Mandelstam's complaint against a fellow writer who had slapped his wife, and objected to a verdict which implied fault on both sides.

Tolstoy was Chairman of the USSR Writers Union in 1936–1938. In January 1937, during the second of the Moscow show trials, at which 17 defendants including former leading Bolsheviks such as Georgy Pyatakov and Karl Radek were forced to confess to crimes they had not committed, Tolstoy signed a collective letter, with other writers, declaring "We demand merciless punishment for traitors, spies and murderers who sell their homeland."

In December 1937, Tolstoy was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He became a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1939.

Peter the Great

Tolstoy spent 16 years studying the life of Peter the Great. His first work on this subject was his 1929 play, Na dybe ("On the Rack"). In the 1920s, Soviet historiography was dominated by the Bolshevik historian Mikhail Pokrovsky, who despised "Peter, whom fawning historians have called the great" as a tyrant who provoked war with Sweden and impoverished his subjects. Tolstoy's 1929 play was true to the party line, depicting Peter as a tyrant who "suppressed everyone and everything as if he had been possessed by demons, sowed fear, and put both his son and his country on the rack." Stalin went to see the play, but left before the end, setting off speculation that he did not like it. Critics consequently trashed it, until Stalin sent Tolstoy a note saying: "A splendid play. Only it's a pity Peter is not depicted heroically enough", and summoned him to advise him on how to write a novelised version of the life of Peter.

In 1935, after Pokrovsky had died and his school of history had been denounced by the party leadership, and the Soviet economy had begun the process of rapid industrialisation through Five Year Plans, Tolstoy wrote a radically different play, Peter I, in which – borrowing a motto from Pushkin that 'Russia came into Europe like the launching of a ship' – the construction of a ship, with Peter acting as the master builder, is the symbol of the entire play. The instruction was followed by a phone call from Stalin, who told Tolstoy that Ivan had "one shortcoming", which was that he "repented of his cruelty".

After the German invasion, Tolstoy moved to Zimenki, a village east of Moscow, where he wrote the first scenes of The Eagle and His Mate, covering the years 1553–1559. In November 1941, he was evacuated to Tashkent, where he completed it the following February. This original version, which was to have been performed in the Maly Theatre, was banned by order of the political director for the Red Army, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, who sent Stalin a memo explaining that Tolstoy had failed to portray Ivan as "the outstanding statesman of the 16th century".

In April 1943, Tolstoy completed The Difficult Years, his second play about Ivan, covering the years to 1571. In June, he sent the script to Stalin, complaining that Shcherbakov had failed to say whether the play was to be allowed to be performed. Stalin then read both scripts, suggested changes, and final versions were completed in November.

Wartime and death

In November 1942, Tolstoy was appointed a member of the Extraordinary State Commission, established to investigate atrocities committed on Soviet territory by the German invaders and their allies. During the Nuremberg trials, the Soviet prosecutor Lev Smirnov posthumously credited Tolstoy with having led the team that investigated war crimes committed in Stavropol, which for the first time ascertained "without reasonable doubt" that gas vans had been used by the Nazis to commit genocide.

In December 1943, Tolstoy was one of a contingent of Soviet and foreign journalists who were sent to Kharkov to cover the first war crimes trial, at which three Germans and a Soviet collaborator were sentenced to death. Ilya Ehrenburg, who also covered the trial, later wrote: "I did not go to the square where the accused were to be hanged. Tolstoy said he must be present: he did not feel he had the right to evade it. After the execution, he came back blacker than night."

In January 1944, Tolstoy was appointed a member of a special commission that was supposedly charged by the Politburo with investigating the massacre in Katyn forest of 22,000 Polish officers, who had been taken prisoner when the Soviet Union occupied the eastern part of Poland in 1939–1940 following the signing of a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. In January 1944, he held a press conference for foreign journalists, in which he and other members of the commission asserted that the officers had been massacred by the Germans in August and September 1941. The special commission's report was submitted by the Soviet prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials, but was not included in the verdict, and in the 1980s, the Soviets belatedly admitted that Stalin ordered the Katyn massacre. As the leading spokesman at the press conference in January 1944, Tolstoy played a major role in ensuring that the Soviet version of the Katyn massacre – which is now known to be a lie – was widely reported in the USA and Great Britain.

He is also suspected of being the main author of a libelous and partly pornographic literary fraud entitled Vyrubova's Diary published in 1927, on instruction from the authorities, to discredit the Russian royal family.

In 1974, a minor planet was discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova and named 3771 Alexejtolstoj after the Red Count.

Comments

While Tolstoy enjoyed huge popularity and success in Russia in his lifetime, Western assessments of him have been generally negative because of his role as a Stalin apologist. Nikolai Tolstoy's summation of his distant relative was: "His personal character was without question beneath contempt... in Stalin, he found a worthy master. Few families have produced a higher literary talent than Leo Tolstoy, but few have sunk to one as degraded as Alexei Nikolaevich."

Professor Gleb Struve, a former White Army soldier and committed anti-communist, who became a leading authority on 20th century Russian literature, reckoned that:

George Orwell branded Tolstoy, along with contemporary Ilya Ehrenburg, as a "literary prostitute" whose freedom of expression was denied by Soviet totalitarianism. However, Tolstoy's friend, Ilya Ehrenburg, reckoned that "like the real artist he was, he was never sure of himself, always dissatisfied, painfully seeking the right form to express what he wanted to say."

Selected works

  • Lirika, a poetry collection (1907)
  • Nikita's Childhood (1921)
  • The Road to Calvary, a trilogy (1921–1940, Stalin Prize of first degree in 1943)
  • Aelita (1923)
  • The Adventures of Nevzorov, or Ibikus (1925)
  • The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (aka The Garin Death Ray) (1926)
  • The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino (1936)
  • Peter I (1929–1934, Stalin Prize of first degree in 1941)
  • A Week in Turenevo (published posthumously, 1958)
  • "Count Cagliostro" (supernatural short story)
  • Ivan the Terrible, a play (1942–1943, Stalin Prize of first degree in 1946 – posthumously)

References

Bibliography

  • Ehrenburg, Ilya (1963). Memoirs: 1921–1941. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing.
  • A.N. Tolstoy at SovLit.net
  • The Marie Antoinette Tapestry, (story), from Such a Simple Thing and Other Stories, FLPH, Moscow, 1959.
  • Biography
  • Works of Aleksei Tolstoy