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Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1883-1945) - pseudonym Acton Bell |
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Novelist, playwright, historian, and short story writer, a former nobleman who immigrated to western Europe after the Bolshevik Revolution. Tolstoi returned to Russia in 1923. Nicknamed "Comrade Count" he was a supporter of Communist Party and honored artist receiving three Stalin Prizes. His two-part historical play on Ivan the Terrible Tolstoi wrote clearly to please Stalin. The Nobel writer Romain Rolland admired the power of Tolstoi's novels and said to him: "What particularly impresses me about your strong and truthful art is the way you mould your personages in their particular surroundings. They seem to constitute an inalienable part of the air, earth, and light which surround and nourish them, and you have the knack of expressing the finest tints of the environment with one stroke of the brush." Aleksei Tolstoi was born in Nikolaevsk (now Pugachyov), in Samara Province, into an aristocratic family distantly related to Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev. He grew up without knowing his real father, Count Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tolstoi, who was a member of the elite of Russian society and a wealthy landowner. His mother, Alexandra Leont'eva Turgeneva, was a minor literary figure. While pregnant with Aleksei, she left her husband and three children, and moved with Aleksei Apollonovich Bostrom to a farm in the Samara region. Bostrom brought Tolstoi as his own child. Count Tolstoi, who died in 1900, never saw his son, but acknowledged paternity and left provision for him in his will. Until the age of 13, Tolstoi was educated at home, then at a secondary school in Samara (1894-1901), and at St. Petersgurg Technological Institute (1901-08). In 1902 he married Julia Rozhansky; they had two children. While in Germany, he met Sophia Dymshits. After leaving Julia, she became his common-law wife. Tolstoi's first literary experiments were born under the influence of the Symbolist movement, but from poetry he soon turned to prose. In 1907 he published a collection of symbolist poems, Lirika. Among his early works were some realistic short stories depicting his childhood. As a writer Tolstoi made his breakthrough with a series of novels exploring the historical process of the impoverishment of the nobility's country estates and the spiritual decline of their owners. Between the years 1914 and 1916 Tolstoi served as a war correspondent for the liberal newspaper Russkie vedomosti, sided with the Whites. He made several visits to the Front line, and travelled in France and England. Tolstoi's war experiences formed the background of Na voyne (1914-16), a collection of stories. In 1917 Tolstoi worked for General Anton Denikin's propaganda section. Though he welcomed the February revolution he was unable to accept the Bolshevist October Revolution, and emigrated in 1918 with his family to Paris. A few years later he went to Berlin where he joined a pro-Communist émigré group and became the editor of the Bolshevik newspaper Nakanune. With the introduction of the New Economic Policy in Russia and a change in his political beliefs, Tolstoi broke with the emigre circles and returned with his family to his homeland. From West Tolstoy brought with him to the novel Syostry (1922), the first part of his trilogy Road to Calvary (1922-42). After an uneasy period, when he was suspected because of his aristocratic origins, Tolstoi established himself among the leading Soviet writers. During the 1920s Tolstoi wrote several plays, including adaptations of works by Eugene O'Neill and Carel Capek. He participated in the anti-fascist congress in Paris and London in 1935-36 and took part in the 2nd International Congress of Writers in Madrid during the Spanish Civil war (1936). In 1936 he was elected Chairman of the Writer's Union and a deputy to the Supreme Soviet in 1937. Two years later he was elected member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. During World War II he served as a journalist and propagandist. His patriotic articles were collected in Chto my zashchishchayem (1942) and Rodina (1943). Tolstoi died in Moscow on February 23, 1945. Tolstoi's major works include Nikita's Childhood (1922), a lyrical story with autobiographical elements of a childhood in a Russian village, and Road to Calvary, about the life of four people, sisters Dasha and Katia, and Telgin and Roshchin, from the eve of World War I to end of the Russian Civil War. It covered the same period as Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don (1928-40), but from the viewpoint of the progressive intelligentsia. Peter the First (1929-45, book 1-2) was hailed as the best Soviet historical novel ever written – also in West perhaps due to its apolitical views. Moreover, the historical novel made a strong comeback in the 1930s and contributed to the rise of historical films. Tolstoi never managed to finish the third part of the book before his death. He followed the myth of Peter the Great as a progressive ruler who made Russia strong, while also having a heart for the people. Tolstoi did not try to interpret history in a new way but used traditional material. Among his sources were works by the novelist Dmitry Merezhkovasky (1865-1941) and Daniil Mordovtsev, and the historians Vasily Klyuchevsky and Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900). Tolstoi's screenplay for the lavishly produced film version from 1937-38, directed by Vladimir Petrov, justified Peter's interest in imperial expansion. Tolstoi's historical drama Na dybe (1929) was about the czar, too, but Peter was characterized as a tyrant. Stalin attended a preview of the play, regretting that "Peter was not drawn heroically enough." Owing to changes in the regime's policies, its second version, Pyotr Pervy (1938) presented the tsar in a more sympathetic light. After Stalin wanted to see himself as a modern-day Peter, the czar become a builder-ruler in the history writing. In 1937 Tolstoi said to his friend, the painter Yurii Annenkov: "I rewrote it again, in conformity with the revelations of the Party, and now I'm writing a third and hopefully final version of the thing, since the second version also didn't satisfy our Joseph." "When a man's at war and constantly facing death he rises above his ordinary self. All the trashy stuff that doesn't matter peels off him, like dead skin after sunburn, and only the kernel, the real man, is left." (in 'The Russian Character', 1944) Tolstoi's political novels include Chornoe zoloto (1932), which painted uncharitable caricatures of Russian émigrés, and Khleb (1937), in which history was crudely falsified to denigrate Trotsky. In his last plays, Oryol i orlitsa (1942,. The Eagle and Its Mate) and Trudnye gody (1943, The Difficult Years) Tolstoi idealized Ivan the Terrible and then drew parallels between him and Stalin – an idea that the film director Sergei Eisenstein developed in his monumental film production, Ivan the Terrible (1945-46). Stalin disliked especially the second part, in which Ivan Groznyi was portrayed as a disturbed Hamlet-like figure, but the first part won a Stalin Prize. Trying to save his film, Eisenstein acknowledged the errors and asked in a letter to Stalin permission to revise the work. In Tolstoi's Ivan the Terrible the czar was a democratic ruler, who worked for the good of Russia tirelessly and mercilessly. The first part dealt with his love for his Kirghiz wife, The Difficult Years focused on Ivan's activities as a statesman. The work, which won Tolstoi a third, posthumous Stalin Prize in 1946, had been commissioned as a result of instructions of the Communist Party concerning "the need for the restoration of a true historica image of Ivan IV in Russian history." Tolstoi also published two science fiction novels, both of which appeared in the experimental 1920s and which were revised during the following decades of Stalinist terror. Aelita (1923), a science-fiction fantasy in the manner of H.G. Wells, told the story of a Soviet expedition to Mars with the aim of establishing communism. The native Martians are in fact long-ago emigrants from Atlantis. The story was adapted into screen in 1924. Aelita's film version preceeded Fritz Lang's Metropolis by three years. Its futuristic, Expressionistic sets were designed by Isaac Rabinovitch of the Kamerny Theatre. Jakov Protazanov, the director, had worked in Paris and Berlin before he returned to the Soviet Union. The film is said to have influenced the design of the Flash Gordon space opera, which was created by the artist Alex Raymond in 1934 and led to a popular radio serial and several films. Tolstoi's Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (1926, The Death Box) described an attempt of an unscrupulous inventor to use his death ray to conquer the world. He manages to rule a decadently capitalist USA for a short period. Bunt mashin (1924) was a play, based on Carel Capek's science fiction story R.U.R. With the journalist Alexander Starchakov, who died in one of Stalin's purges, Tolstoi wrote the libretto for Dmitri Shostakovich's satirical opera Orango (1932). The opera in three acts, which was rediscovered in 2006, portrays a "biomorph", half-man and half-monkey.
Selected works:
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