Aleksey Tolstoy

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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:

His father had been a rake-hell cavalry officer, whose rowdy excesses proved too much even for his fellow hussars. He was obliged to leave his regiment and the two capital cities, and retired to an estate in Samara, Russia. There he met and married Alexandra Leontievna Turgenev, a lively girl of good family, but slender means. They had two sons, Alexander and Mstislav, and a daughter Elizabeth. But the wild blood of the Tolstoys did not allow him to settle down to an existing domestic harmony. Within a year the retired hussar had been exiled to Kostroma for insulting the Governor of Samara. When strings were eventually pulled to arrange his return, he celebrated it by provoking a fellow-noble to a duel. Alexandra fell in love with Alexei Appollonovich Bostrom. In May 1882, already two months pregnant with her fourth child, she fled into the arms of her lover. The Count threatened Bostrom with a revolver but was exculpated by the courts. The ecclesiastical court, in granting a divorce, ruled that the guilty wife should never be allowed to remarry. In order to keep the expected baby, Alexandra was compelled to assert that it was Bostrom's child.

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.

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:

There was a place in Berlin that reminded one of Noah's Ark, where the clean and unclean met peacefully; it was called the House of Arts and was just a common German café where Russian writers gathered on Fridays. Stories were read aloud by Tolstoy ... Apparently, not all the dice had been cast yet. There were people who called Gorky the 'semi emigre'... Alexey Tolstoy, surrounded by Smena Vekh (Changing Landmarks) people, alternately praised the Bolsheviks as, 'unifiers of the Russian land,' and indulged in angry abuse. The fog was still swirling.

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:

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:

I felt ashamed, bitter and very, very hurt. Don't you feel the stifling atmosphere in which 170 million Soviet people are suffocating? ... For the sake of Stalin's boundless ambition, historical facts are manipulated, and you put your thin hand to it ... In Bread, you are pushing the assertion that the revolution won thanks only to Stalin ... Fear is the dominant emotion that grips citizens of the USSR. Don't you see it? ... Do you live in an ivory tower?

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.

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.

Tolstoy died on 23 February 1945 in Moscow.

Aleksey Tolstoy

Aleksey Tolstoy

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