Tolstoy, Aleksey, Count

Tolstoy, Aleksey (Konstantinovich), Count

(born Sept. 5, 1817, St. Petersburg, Russia—died Oct. 10, 1875, Krasny Rog) Russian poet, novelist, and dramatist. A distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, he held various court posts. In the 1850s he began to publish comic verse, often satirizing government bureaucracy. Among his popular historical novels is Prince Serebrenni (1862). His dramatic trilogy about the 16th and 17th centuries—The Death of Ivan the Terrible (1866), Tsar Feodor Ioannovich (1868), and Tsar Boris (1870)—is written in blank verse and contains some of Russia's best historical dramatic writing. His lyric poetry includes many love and nature poems, as well as Ioann Damaskin (1859), a paraphrase of St. John of Damascus's prayer for the dead.

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Tolstoy, Aleksey (Nikolayevich), Count

(born Jan. 10, 1883, Nikolayevsk, Russia—died Feb. 23, 1945, Moscow) Russian writer. Distantly related to the great novelist Leo Tolstoy, he supported the anti-Bolshevik White Army in the Russian Civil War, then emigrated to western Europe, where he wrote one of his finest works, the nostalgic, partly autobiographical Nikita's Childhood (1921). In 1923 he returned to Russia as a supporter of the Soviet regime. He wrote many works that are purely entertaining and, in wartime, patriotic articles. He won three Stalin Prizes, for the novel trilogy The Road to Calvary (1920–41), the novel Peter the First (1929–45), and the play Ivan the Terrible (1943).