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:
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. His mother wrote children's stories, using the pseudonym Alexander Bostrom. Due in part to their rejection by both the Russian nobility and the Russian Church, Aleksey grew up in a staunchly atheistic and anti-monarchist environment, and was encouraged to be creative. He was home taught by his parents, and by a visiting tutor, until the age of 14, when the family moved to Samara, after selling their farm, and he was enrolled in a local school.
St. Petersburg Count Nikolai Tolstoy died in 1900, leaving a will from which Aleksey received 30,000 rubles. This allowed him to move to St Petersburg, where he studied at the Technological Institute St Petersburg in 1901–1906. In June 1902, he married a fellow student, Julia Rozhansky, the daughter of a provincial doctor. Their son, Yuri, was born in 1903. According to Nikolai Tolstoy, he took part in a student protest on 12 February 1902 along Nevsky Prospekt, which was broken up by police and Cossacks, and joined the Social Democratic Party, but there does not appear to be any corroboration for this account of his student radicalism. He avoided becoming involved in the 1905 Revolution, by moving to Dresden in February 1906, to enrol in the Royal Saxon Higher School after the government temporarily closed the Technological Institute.
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.
Paris In 1907, Tolstoy broke off his studies to dedicate himself to writing. The couple decided to emigrate in 1907, and arrived in Paris in January 1908, to join a wide network of emigré Russian writers and artists, including Nikolay Gumilyov, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Andrei Bely, Maximilian Voloshin. He and Gumilyov launched a periodical that folded after one issue for lack of funds. 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. One young poet he met mistook him for Leo Tolstoy, who had died in 1910 aged 82.
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. By 1910, his success as a writer enabled them to move into a flat along Nevsky Prospekt, but because of her husband's refusal to grant a divorce, when she became pregnant, she returned to Paris in May 1911, where he joined her, so that he could be registered under French law as the father of their daughter, Marianna. They returned to St. Petersburg later in the year, but moved to Moscow in 1912.
In the summer of 1914 Tolstoy and Dymshitz took a vacation in Koktebel, Crimea, where he met a 17 year old ballerina named Margarita Kandaurova. Nikolai Tolstoy wrote in 1983: "The break with Sophia was as abrupt as it had been with Julia. Out on a stroll, Aleksey said significantly, 'I feel that this winter you're going to leave me.' Sophia did not reply, but took the hint and departed for another visit to Paris. The baby Mariana was deposited with an aunt."Tolstoy (1983), p.292
Tolstoy hoped to marry Kandaurova, but she rejected him, and before the end of the year he had met his third wife, Natalya Volkenstein, née Krandinskaya, by whom he had three children.
During World War I Tolstoy worked as a war correspondent, visiting England and France, and wrote several essays and two plays.
Emigré Tolstoy opposed the October Revolution. To escape living under Bolshevik rule, he moved with his family in 1918 to Odessa. Then, as the White Army was driven out of Crimea, they fled to Constantinople, before once more relocating to Paris. Unhappy at being, as he put it, "cut off from his homeland", in 1920, he wrote the story Nikita's Childhood, about growing up as an exile. Nikita was their oldest child, born in 1917, who was starting to speak with a French accent.
While living in France, Aleksey wrote several plays, and began writing a lengthy historical novel entitled, The Road to Calvary, which tracked the period from 1914 to 1919 including the Russian Civil War, which he had completed by 1921. Reaction to it in Soviet Russia was very hostile. The leading Bolshevik literary critic, Aleksandr Voronsky, editor of Krasnaya Nov described Tolstoy's depiction of the new regime as a "tendentious lie" full of "improbable banalities" and berated the writer for his "countish hatred, his lordly disdain, his spite, bitterness, fury."
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".Ehrenburg (1963), p.25 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."Tolstoy (1983), p.298
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: Ah, where are those islands ... Where the villain Yagoda Would not drive people to the wall and Alyoshka Tolstoy Would not skim it all.
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 1937, he published his novel Bread, which eulogised Stalin's role in the defence of Tsaritsyn (later renamed Stalingrad) during the civil war. This prompted one Soviet reader to write to him anonymously, saying that he had previously admired Tolstoy as Russia's greatest living writer since the death of Maxim Gorky, but on reading Bread:
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