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Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1883-1945) | |
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Novelist, playwright, historian, and short story writer, a former nobleman who immigrated to western Europe after the Bolshevik Revolution. Aleksei 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. "Perhaps some day, we'll build a large spaceship, stock it with a six-month supply of food, oxygen and ultralyddite, and invite a few cranks to go up in it. 'Tired of living in our century? Want to live a hundred years from now? Get into this box and be well recompensated—considering what you'll find on your return! You'll have been gone a hundred years.' We'll shoot them into space at the speed of light. For six monts they'll languish there, grow beards, then come back to Earth to find a Golden Age. That's what it'll be like." (from Aelita by Alexei Tolstoy, translated from the Russian by Lucy Flaxman, Foreign Language Publishing House, 1958, p. 38) 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 in Sosnovka 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. She was a grand-niece of Nikolai Turgenev, a leader of the Decembrists, who organized the uprising of 14 December 1825. While pregnant with Aleksei, she left her husband and three children, and moved with Aleksei Apollonovich Bostrom, Tolstoi's stepfather, to a farm in the Samara region. Bostrom brought Tolstoi as his own child. There, out in the wilds, he learned to love the vast spaces of Cenral Russia, and heard folk legends and old songs. 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. After his stepfather sold the property, the family moved to the Volga town of Samara, where Tolstoi attended a secondary school (1894-1901). He then studied 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. "I saw ruined cities and villages,
fields gashed by trenches and covered with little crosses, peasants
silently rooting about among the embers of fires," he recalled. ('Foreword' by V. Troitsky, in Peter the Great, Volume 1, 1982,
p. 9) Tolstoi's war experiences formed the
background of Na voyne (1914-16), a collection of stories. While in Odessa, 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 Tolstoi 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 Karel Čapek. 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 for his historical fiction and
works on Russian folklore. Referring to Tolstoi, the poet Olga Ivinskaya wrote bitterly of his attitude toward Stalin's Great Purges in her memoirs: "One [Aleksei Tolstoi] displayed the greatest lack of conscience and cynicism, acclaiming the executioners in order to keep his estate, motor cars, and social status. The other [Boris Pasternak] maintained a stubborn silence". (A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak: The Memoirs of Olga Ivinskaya, translated from the Russian with introduction and notes by Max Hayward, Collins and Harvill Press, 1978, p. 268) During World War II Tolstoi served as a journalist and propagandist. From his dacha he contributed stories to Krasnaya Zvezda, the most popular wartime paper, which was delivered to the front. His patriotic articles were collected in Chto my zashchishchayem (1942) and Rodina (1943). Aleksei 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.
Before beginning to work on his novel on the history of the life and
reign of the Czar Peter the Great, he wrote the short stories
'Obsession' and 'Peter's Day,' in which the ruler was portyrayed
as a tragic figure, alone with his reforms. Tolstoi was dissatisfied
with these stories but they formed a kind of preliminry study
to his masterpiece. At the same time he was busy on writing the
trilogy Ordeal, which focused
on the revolutionary upheaveals, that gave rise to the Soviet Union. Peter the First (1929-45, book 1-2) was hailed as the
best Soviet historical novel ever written – also in West it was
received with praise mostly due to
its vivid portrayal of the Petrin era. Moreover, the historical novel
made a new
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. Events break off at the moment when the Czar takes
Narva from Sweden. During WW II, Peter I was serialized in the literary magazine Novyi Mir from March 1944 through January 1945. Originally Tolstoi planned to take the story to the Battle of
Poltava in 1709, "or perhaps up to the Prut campaign. I don't know yet.
I don't want people to age in it– what can I do with them when they are
old?" ('Foreword' by V.
Troitsky, in Peter the Great,
Volume 1, 1982, p. 17) Tolstoi followed the myth of Peter the
Great as
a progressive ruler who made Russia strong, while also having a heart
for the people. Above all, Peter is a man of action, "inflexible and
ruthless where matters of state were concerned," as he wrote in one of
the notes to the novel. (Ibid., pp. 14-15)Tolstoi
did not try to interpret history in a new way
but used traditional material. Tolstoi's sources included 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
1937-39, directed by Vladimir Petrov, justified Peter's interest in
imperial expansion. The script underwent several revisions. Before
being arrested, the deputy director of the Central Committee's
Department of Cultural and Educational Work recommended to stop the
whole project. 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. Nevertheless, one critic stated in a review that "This play by Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi – a former count, in past years a bard of the bankrupt aristocracy, and currently numbering among the petty bourgeois "fellow travelers" – is the malicious, maddened sortie of a class enemy, covered over with the artful mask of "historicity."" (Afterimage: Aleksei Tolstoi's Many Returns to Peter the Great' by Kevin M.F. Platt, in Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, edited by Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger, 2006, p. 55) Following Stalin's urge to present 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." (The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia by Maureen Perrie, 2001, p. 53) 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." Besides works on history, Tolstoi also published children's stories, of which the most beloved is Zolotoy klyuchik (1935, The Little Golden Key, or the Adventures of Burattino), and two science
fiction novels, both of
which appeared in the experimental 1920s and which were revised during
the following decades of Stalinist terror. The Little Golden Key was inspired by Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883). Tolstoy wrote the fairy-tale while recovering from a heart attack. In a letter to Gorky he said: "I'm working on Pinocchio.
At the beginning I only wanted to rewrite in Russian Collodi's content.
But then I gave up on it, it was coming out a bit boring and bland. . .
. now I'm writing on the same subject in my own way." ('Translating Russian Literature into Italian: A Case Study between Language and Culture' by Ilaria Remonato, in Translation Studies: Theory and Practice, Volume 3, Issue 1(5), 2023, p. 47) The golden key of the title opens a secret door to a magic theatre. Tolstoi
knew well the original classic story: in the 1920s, he had collaborated
with Nina Petrovna in the Russian translation of Pinocchio. Aelita (1923),
a
science-fiction fantasy in the manner of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne,
told the story of
a Soviet expedition to Mars. It turn out that the
native Martians are in fact long-ago emigrants from Atlantis. The
rocket-ship is designed by an ingenious engineer named Mstislav
Sergeyevich Los, who is accompanied on the flight by a Red Army
soldier, Alexei Ivanovich Gusev. Los has a cosmic love affair with the
beautiful Aelita, whose father is the head of the Supreme Council.
"When Los uttered the word Aelita it stirred him in two ways; the first
two letters AE, or "seen for the last time," made him feel sad, and the
letters LITA, or "starlight," diffused a silvery radiance. In this way,
the language of the new world fused itself as the finest matter with
his consciousness." (Ibid., p. 69) Aelita shares some similarities with Edgar Rice Burroughs' Princess of Mars (1912). Tolstoi possibly had read the work. The story
was adapted into screen in 1924. Aelita's movie version, a big budgeted Hollywood style production, promoted the idea of interplanetary socialist revoliution. ('Cosmonaut Nostalgia in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film' by Cathleen S. Lewis, in Remembering the space age: Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference, edited by Steven J. Dick, 2008, p. 254)
The
futuristic, Expressionistic sets were designed by Isaac Rabinovitch of
the Kamerny Theatre; Alexandra Exter made the spectacular geometric
costumes and set elements for the Martian scenes. Before returning to
the Soviet Union, director Jakov Protazanov had worked in
Paris and Berlin. A great part of the film's glamour can be credited to Yulia Solntseva (Queen Aelita), whose beauty stunned all audences ‒ many babies born in 1924 were named Aelita. However, the movie was repeatedly attacked in the Soviet press, and eventually removed from distribution. It has been claimed that its designs influnced the Flash Gordon space opera, created by the artist Alex Raymond in 1934. Aelita preceeded Fritz Lang's Metropolis by three years. 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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