Count and academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy was an extremely talented and versatile writer who wrote in a variety of genres and directions. In his arsenal there are two collections of poems, processing of fairy tales, scripts, a huge number of plays, journalism and other articles. But above all, he is a great prose writer and master of fascinating stories. He would have been awarded the USSR State Prize (in 1941, 1943, and already posthumously in 1946). The biography of the writer contains interesting facts from Tolstoy’s life. They will be discussed further.
Tolstoy: life and work
December 29, 1882 (as old as January 10, 1883) in Nikolaevsk (Pugachevsk) of the Saratov province , Tolstoy Alexei Nikolaevich was born. When his mother was pregnant, she left her husband N. A. Tolstoy and moved to live with the Zemstvo employee A. A. Bostrom.
Alyosha spent all his childhood in the estate of his stepfather in the village of Sosnovka, Samara province. These were the happiest years for a child who grew up very strong and cheerful. Then Tolstoy graduated from the Petersburg Technological Institute, but did not defend his diploma (1907).
From 1905 to 1908, he began to publish poetry and prose. The fame came to the writer after the stories and short stories of the “Trans-Volga” cycle (1909-1911), the novels “Eccentrics” (1911) and “The Lame Barin” (1912). Here he described anecdotal and extraordinary incidents that occurred with the eccentric landowners of his native Samara province.
World War I
Interesting facts from Tolstoy’s life indicate that in World War I he worked as a war correspondent. And then he reacted with great enthusiasm to the February Revolution. The writer at that time lived in Moscow. At the time of the socialist revolution, the Provisional Government appointed Tolstoy as commissioner for registering the press. From 1917 to 1918, the entire creative activity of the apolitical writer reflected depression and concern.
After the revolution, from 1918 to 1923, the life of Alexei Tolstoy went into exile. In 1918 he went to Ukraine on a literary tour, and in 1919 he was evacuated from Odessa to Istanbul.
Emigration
Returning to the topic “Tolstoy: life and work”, it should be noted that he lived in Paris for a couple of years, then moved to Berlin in 1921, where he began to establish old ties with writers left in Russia. As a result, without settling abroad, during the NEP (1923) he returned to his homeland. His life abroad bore fruit, and his autobiographical works “Childhood of Nikita” (1920-1922), “Walking in agony” - the first edition (1921) saw the light of day, by the way, in 1922 he announced that it was there will be a trilogy. Over time, the anti-Bolshevik trend of the novel was corrected, the writer was inclined to redo his works, often hesitating between the poles due to the political situation in the USSR. The writer never forgot about his "sins" - of noble origin and emigration, but understood that he had a wide circle of readers right now, in Soviet times.
New creative period
Upon arrival in Russia, the novel Aelita (1922-1923) of the science fiction genre was published. It tells how a fighter of the Red Army sets up a revolution on Mars, but everything went wrong. A little later, the second novel of the same genre, “Hyperboloid Engineer Garin” (1925-1926), which the author redone many times, was released. In 1925, the fantastic story “Union of Five” appeared. Tolstoy, by the way, in his science fiction predicted many technical miracles, for example, space flights, trapping cosmic voices, a laser, a “parachute brake”, fission of the atomic nucleus, etc.
From 1924 to 1925, Tolstoy Alexei Nikolaevich created a novel of the satirical genre “The Adventures of Nevzorov, or Ibicus”, which describes the adventures of an adventurer. Obviously, the image of Ostap Bender from Ilf and Petrov was born from here.
Interesting facts from the life of Tolstoy
Already in 1937, Tolstoy, by state order, wrote the story about Stalin's “Bread,” where in the described events the outstanding role of the leader of the proletariat and Voroshilov was clearly visible.
One of the best children's stories in world literature was the story of A. N. Tolstoy's "Golden Key, or The Adventures of Pinocchio" (1935). The writer very successfully and thoroughly redid the fairy tale "Pinocchio" by the Italian writer Carlo Collodi.
Between 1930 and 1934, Tolstoy created two books about Peter the Great and his time. Here the writer gives his assessment of that era and the concept of the king’s reforms. He wrote his third book, Peter the Great, already deadly sick.
During World War II, Alexei Nikolaevich writes many journalistic articles and stories. Among them are "Russian character", "Ivan the Terrible", etc.
Contradictions
The personality of the writer Alexei Tolstoy is quite controversial, as, in principle, is his work. In the Soviet Union, he was the second largest writer after Maxim Gorky. Tolstoy was a symbol of how people from the upper nobility became real Soviet patriots. He never really complained about need and always lived like a master, because he never stopped working on his typewriter and was always in demand.
Interesting facts from Tolstoy’s life also include the fact that he could have bothered about arrested or disgraced acquaintances, but he could have avoided it. He was married four times. N.V. Krandievskaya, one of his wives, in some way served as the prototype of the heroines of the novel "Walking in agony."
Patriot
Aleksei Nikolaevich loved to write in a realistic manner using true facts, but he also created fantastic science fiction. He was loved, he was the soul of any society, but there were those who showed contempt for the writer. These included A. Akhmatova, M. Bulgakov, O. Mandelstam (from the last Tolstoy even received a slap in the face).
Alexey Tolstoy was a real national Russian writer, patriot and statesman, he most often wrote on foreign material and at the same time did not want to learn foreign languages to better feel his native Russian language.
After the death of Gorky from 1936 to 1938, he headed the Union of Writers of the USSR. After the war, he was a member of the commission to investigate the crimes of the Nazi occupiers.
It should be noted that the years of Tolstoy's life fell on the period from 1883 to 1945. He died on February 23, 1945 from cancer at the age of 62 and was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery.