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LEO TOLSTOY

Many of the Tolstoys devoted their spare time to literary pursuits. For instance, Count Alexei Konstantinovich (1817–75) was a courtier but also one of the most popular Russian poets of his time. He wrote admirable ballads, a historical novel, some licentious verse, and satires published under the penname of Kozma Prutkov. His lasting contribution to the Russian literature was a trilogy of historical dramas, modelled after Pushkin’s Boris Godunov.

Count Lev Nikolaevich (1828–1910), more widely known abroad as Leo Tolstoy is acclaimed as the greatest novelist since Cervantes. After he started his career in the military, he was first drawn to writing books when he served in Chechenya, and already his first novel, Kazaky (”The Cossacks”), was something quite unlike anything written before him. It was in his family estate Yasnaya Polyana near Tula that he created two novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, that are widely acclaimed as among the best novels ever written. Later he developed a kind of non-traditional Christian philosophy, described in his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, that shares some similarities with Buddhism, and which inspired Rainer Maria Rilke and a young Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi whose influence extended out to Martin Luther King. The non violent philosophy of Tolstoy transcends more movements than many people may be accustomed to think.

Of Lev’s thirteen children, most spent their life either promoting his teachings or denouncing them. His youngest daughter and secretary, Alexandra Lvovna (1884–1979), had a particularly troubled life. Although she shared with her father the doctrine of non-violence, she felt it was her duty to take part in the events of World War I. For her courage she was rewarded with three St George medals and the rank of colonel. The Bolsheviks imprisoned her in 1920, but she was installed as the director of the Tolstoy museum in Yasnaya Polyana the next year. Upon leaving Russia in 1929, she settled in the USA and founded the Tolstoy Fund. She helped many Russian intellectuals (notably Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Rachmaninoff) to escape Nazi persecution and to settle in America.

Count Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1883–1945) belonged to a different branch of the family. His early short stories, published in 1910s, were panned by critics for excessive naturalism and wanton eroticism. After the Revolution he briefly emigrated to Germany, but then changed his political views and returned to the Soviet Union. His science fiction novels Aelita (1923), about a journey to the Mars, and Engineer Garin’s Death Ray (1927) were popular with teenagers. In his later years he published two lengthy novels on historical subjects, Peter the First (1929–45) and The Road to Calvary (1922–41). As a staunch supporter of Stalin, he became known as “Red Count” or “Comrade Count” and his work was acknowledged to be classics of the Soviet literature. His reputation declined with that of Socialist Realism in general.

His granddaughter Tatiana Tolstaya (born in 1951) is one of the foremost Russian short story writers. Another living member of the family is Nikolai Tolstoy-Miloslavsky (born in 1935), a controversial British historian.

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| 23.10.2008 |

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