Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy
Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy | |
---|---|
RSFSR, Soviet Union | |
Occupation | Novelist, poet, journalist, writer |
Period | 1907–1945 |
Genre | Science fiction, historical fiction |
Spouse | J. Rožanska |
Signature | |
Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Алексей Николаевич Толстой; 10 January 1883 [
Despite having opposed the
Life and career
Parentage
Tolstoy's mother Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva (1854–1906) was a grand-niece of
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
What is known is that Bostrom brought the boy up as his own child, on his family farm in Samara province,[3] 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.[4]
Early life
Tolstoy's adoptive father was a liberal landowner, who had supported the emancipation of Russian serfs in the 1860s.
St. Petersburg
Count Nikolai Tolstoy died in 1900, leaving a will from which Aleksey received 30,000
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.[5]
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 emigre Russian writers and artists, including
In 1908, he learnt from his ex-wife that their son had died from meningitis. According to Nikolai Tolstoy,
Sophia claimed in a pious official memoir published in Moscow in 1973 that Alexey, 'took the child's death very much to heart.' One may question this. The father, after all, made no attempt to visit his ailing son before his lonely end, nor did he return for the funeral (though he did make another, business journey to Petersburg from Paris). As subsequent events were to show, he could evince extraordinary callousness toward individual members of the human race, whatever his broadly liberal viewpoint toward the species at large.[8]
Return to Russia
Aleksey and Sophia returned to St Petersburg in January 1909.
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 that "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."[10]
Tolstoy hoped to marry Kandaurova, but she rejected him,[5] 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.[3]
Emigre
Tolstoy opposed the Bolshevik Revolution. To escape living under Bolshevik rule, he moved with his family in 1918 to Odesa. 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.[3] 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."[11]
By 1921, Tolstoy was bothered by the
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.[12]
Soviet dignitary
Tolstoy revisited Russia in May 1923, and decided to return permanently, having decided that "no literature will come out of the emigration".[13] 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."[14]
Because of his ancestry he was sometimes called "Comrade Count" or "Red Count".[15]
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'.[16] 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."[17] 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.[18]
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.[19]
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.[20] A critic writing in the same magazine praised The Road to Calvary as the best novel ever written by an emigre Russian.[21]
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."[22] 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.[23]
Tolstoy was Chairman of the USSR Writers Union in 1936-38. 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."[24]
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? [25]
In December 1937 Tolstoy
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"[26] 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."[27]
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.[27] 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.[28]
The first volume of his uncompleted novel, Peter the Great was published in 1936, and won a Stalin Prize.
In 1939, with war looming in Russia, Tolstoy produced a third version of his play, which stressed the importance of the army, and the patriotism of its foot soldiers.[27]
Ivan the Terrible
In December 1940 Tolstoy was commissioned to write a play about the life of Ivan the Terrible, after the Central Committee had issued an instruction that Ivan's role in history was to be re-evaluated.[29] 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.'[30]
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 1553-59. 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 the Red Army, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, who sent Stalin a memo explaining that Tolstoy had failed to portray Ivan as "the outstanding stateman of the 16th century".[29] Despite this official rebuke, Tolstoy was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1943 for The Road to Calvary.[31]
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.[29] Both scripts were published in 1944, and The Eagle and His Mate received its premiere in the Maly Theatre in October, but the reviews were such that it was taken off, and the next performance opened a week after Tolstoy's death. The premiere of The Difficult Years was delayed until 1946.[32]
Wartime
In November 1942 Tolstoy was appointed a member of the
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."[34]
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 under a 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.[35] 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 not to be a lie – was widely reported in the USA and Great Britain.[35]
Death
Tolstoy died on 23 February 1945 in Moscow.
Legacy
Tolstoy is credited with having produced some of the earliest works of science fiction in the
He penned several books for children, starting with Nikita's Childhood, a memorable account of his early years (the book is sometimes mistakenly believed to be about his son, Nikita; in truth, however, he only used the name because it was his favorite – and he would later give it to his eldest son). In 1936, he created an adaptation of the famous Italian fairy tale about Pinocchio entitled the Adventures of Buratino or The Golden Key, whose main character, Buratino, quickly became hugely popular among the Soviet populace. The creator of the Moscow Children's Theatre, Natalya Sats spent several months persuading him to write the work, and finally won him over by supplying his wife with foreign fashion magazines.[36]
He is also suspected of being the main author of a libelous and partly pornographic literary fraud entitled Vryubova's Diary published in 1927, on instruction from the authorities, to discredit the Russian royal family.
In 1974, a
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 that "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.[38]
Professor Gleb Struve, a former White Army soldier and committed anti-Communist, who became a leading authority on 20th century Russian literature reckoned that:
Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy is, without doubt, one of the most gifted Russian writers of the 20th century … But—and this is the point—this man, endowed with so many extraordinary gifts and sharing the heritage of the great age of Russian literature, lacks one quality which distinguished all of the great Russian poets and writers : a sense of moral and social responsibility. His essence is that of a cynic and opportunist.[39]
George Orwell branded Tolstoy, along with contemporary Ilya Ehrenburg, as a “literary prostitute” whose freedom of expression was denied by Soviet totalitarianism.[40]
But 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." [41]
Selected works
- Lirika, a poetry collection (1907)
- Nikita's Childhood (1921)
- The Road to Calvary, a trilogy (1921–40, Stalin Prize in 1943)
- Aelita (1923)
- The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin(aka The Garin Death Ray) (1926)
- The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino(1936)
- Peter I (1929–34, Stalin Prize in 1941)
- A Week in Turenevo (published posthumously, 1958)
- "Count Cagliostro" (supernatural short story)
References
Notes
- ^ Bunin, Ivan. "Дневники Бунина (1945-1953)". bunin-lit.ru. Retrieved 4 October 2022.
- ^ Tolstoy (1983), pp. 283–84
- ^ a b c d "Толстой Алексей Николаевич 1883-1945 Биогафический указатель". Khronos (in Russian).
- ^ a b c Neverov, Alexander. "Алексей Толстой". 24СМИ. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
- ^ a b c d e f Khmelnitskaya, Lyudmila. "Сплетения судеб (Исаак Розенфельд, Софья Дымшиц-Толстая, Марк и Белла Шагалы)". Музей Марка Шагала. Archived from the original on 6 October 2014. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
- ISBN 0-85031-998-6.
- ^ "Алексей Толстой;". Культупа.РФ. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
- ^ a b Tolstoy (1983), p.289
- ^ Ehrenburg. People and Life. p. 116.
- ^ Tolstoy (1983), p.292
- ^ Maguire, Robert A. (1987). Red Virgin Soil, Soviet Literature in the 1920s. Ithaca: Cornell U.P. p. 249.
- ^ Ehrenburg (1963), p. 20
- ^ Ehrenburg (1963), p.25
- ^ Tolstoy (1983), p.298
- ^ ""Красный граф" Алексей Толстой". АЛЕФ.
- ISBN 0-19-505001-0.
- ^ Lyons, Eugene (n.d.). Assignment in Utopia. London: George G. Harrop. p. 587.
- ISBN 0-939010-27-5.
- ^ Reeder. Anna Akhmatova. p. 230.
- ^ Maguire. Red Virgin Soil. pp. 249–50.
- ^ Maguire. Red Virgin Soil. p. 314.
- ISBN 0-00-262501-6.
- ISBN 978-1-59558-056-6.
- ^ a b Zalessky, K.A. "Алексей Николаевич Толстой Товарищ граф". Khronos (in Russian). Retrieved 6 October 2022.
- ^ Torchinov. V.A., and Leontyuk, A.M. "Алексей Николаевич Толстой, Неподдельный граф (Aleksei Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Genuine Count)". Khronos (in Russian). Retrieved 7 October 2022.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ McSmith, Andy. Fear and the Muse. p. 223.
- ^ a b c Gorchakov, Nikolai A. (1957). The Theatre in Soviet Russia. London: Oxford U.P. pp. 315–17.
- ISBN 0-75381-766-7.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-300-10646-6.
- ISBN 0-333-65684-9.
- ^ Perrie. The Cult of Ivan the Terrible. pp. 135–36.
- ^ Perrie. The Cult of Ivan the Terrible. pp. 145–47.
- ^ "Nuremberg Trial Proceedings: Vol. 7: Sixty-second Day, Tuesday, 19 February 1946, Morning Session" The Avalon Project
- ^ Ehrenburg, Ilya (1961). People and Life, a first volume of autobiography. London: Macgibbon & Kee. p. 138.
- ^ a b Wasilewski, Witold. "The Katyn Lie. Its rise and duration". IPN (Institut Pamieci Narodowi). Institute of National Remembrance (Warsaw). Retrieved 11 October 2022.
- ISBN 978-0-691-192727.
- ISBN 3-540-00238-3.
- ^ Tolstoy (1983), p.320
- ^ Struve, Gleb (11 October 1941). "ALEXEI TOLSTOY". The Tablet. Retrieved 21 March 2014.
- ^ "The Prevention of Literature". The Orwell Prize. 9 December 2010. Retrieved 8 November 2019.
- ^ Ehrenburg. People and Life. p. 131.
Bibliography
- Ehrenburg, Ilya (1963). Memoirs: 1921–1941. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing.
- ISBN 0-241-10979-5.
External links
- Works by or about Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy at Internet Archive
- (in English) Petri Liukkonen. "Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1883–1945)". Books and Writers.
- (in English) A.N. Tolstoy at SovLit.net
- (in English) The Marie Antoinette Tapestry, (story), from Such a Simple Thing and Other Stories, FLPH, Moscow, 1959.
- (in Russian) Biography
- (in Russian) Works of Aleksei Tolstoy
- Aleksei N. Tolstoy at IMDb
- Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy at Find a Grave