Early life Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy was born in
Saint Petersburg to the famed family of
Tolstoy. His father, Count Konstantin Petrovich Tolstoy (1780–1870), a son of the army general, was a
Russian Assignation Bank councilor. His mother, Anna Alekseyevna Perovskaya (1796–1857), was an illegitimate daughter of Count
Aleksey Kirillovich Razumovsky (1748–1822), an heir of the legendary Ukrainian
hetman Alexey Razumovsky. A. K. Tolstoy's uncle (on his father's side) was
Fyodor Tolstoy (1783–1873). His uncle on his mother's side was Aleksey Perovsky (1787–1836), an author known under the pen name of
Antony Pogorelsky. Aleksey Konstantinovich was a second cousin of
Leo Tolstoy; Count
Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy was their common great-grandfather. Remembering those happy years, Aleksey later wrote: In early 1826 Anna Perovskaya returned to Saint Petersburg with her brother and son. Here, due to his mother's closeness with the court of the Tsar, Aleksey was admitted to the future Tsar
Alexander II's childhood entourage and in August became what was officially termed "a comrade in games" for the young Crown Prince. Aleksey's duties were not many: he had to visit the Crown Prince in Saint Petersburg and
Tsarskoye Selo, take walks with him on
Yelagin Island and participate in games, many of which were, in effect, small scale military exercises. In autumn of 1826 Aleksey met
Aleksander Pushkin for the first time. In summer 1827 the family visited Germany where in
Weimar young Aleksey met
Goethe. The great man greeted the boy very warmly and left him a fragment of a
mammoth tusk with his own drawing (depicting a
frigate) on it, for a present. Aleksey, having been awe-stricken, remembered little: "Only his magnificent features and the way he took me upon his lap," according to his autobiography. The family spent the next ten years in continuous travel, both in Russia and abroad. An 1831 trip to Italy especially impressed the 13-year-old. "Back in Russia I fell into a deep nostalgic depression, longing for Italy which felt like a real motherland; desperately mourning the loss, I cried at night when my dreams carried me off to this Paradise lost," he wrote in his autobiography decades later.
Career In 1834 Tolstoy enrolled in the Moscow Foreign Ministry State Archive as a "student", where he got his first taste of working with real historical documents. Tolstoy showed great interest in all things macabre, influenced, again, by his late uncle who "was obsessed with mysticism in every possible form" Tolstoy himself saw the story as insignificant and made no attempt to include it in any of the subsequent compilations; it was only in 1900 that
The Vampire was re-issued. In the autumn of 1843 Tolstoy debuted as a poet: his poem "Serebryanka" was published in the No.40 edition of
Listok Dlya Svetskikh Lyudey (The Paper for Fashionable People). published in the 1st volume of Count
Vladimir Sollogub's
Yesterday and Today almanac. The 2nd volume featured
Amena, a novella, described as an extract from a novel called
Stebelovsky which remained unfinished. Throughout the 1840s Tolstoy led a busy high society life, full of pleasure trips, salon parties and balls, hunting sprees and fleeting romances. He was described as "a handsome young man with blonde hair and a freshly coloured face" and was renowned for his physical strength, "bending spoons, forks and horse-shoes and driving nails into walls with one finger." In the early 1850s, in collaboration with the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, Tolstoy created the fictional writer
Kozma Prutkov, a petty bureaucrat with great self-esteem who parodied the poetry of the day and soon became famous for his utterly banal aphorisms. The Minister of Education Evgraf Kovalevsky personally permitted the publication, his rather daring decision causing a serious rift between the two departments. Tolstoy's poems were appearing in virtually all the major Russian magazines of the time, regardless of their ideological inclinations. Yet, in 1857 his relationship with the leftist
Sovremennik group became strained. Tolstoy drifted towards the
Slavophiles and their
Russkaya Beseda magazine, becoming a close friend of Ivan Aksakov and
Aleksey Khomyakov, but this liaison was short-lived too. A fierce opponent of
xenophobia, he saw Russia as a European country, and Russians as Europeans. This clashed with the Slavophile doctrine of maintaining Russia's "special place" in the world. "[Speaking] of slavophiles, Khomyakov sickens me when he places [Russia] above the West just on the strength of our being
Orthodox," Tolstoy wrote in a letter. This aborted conversation, as it happened, brought to an end a friendship that had lasted for forty years. 1867 saw the release of
Poems, the vast collection of Tolstoy's verse (all in all, 131 pieces), the only such compilation published in his lifetime.
The Death of Ivan the Terrible, published in 1866 in
Otechestvennye Zapiski magazine, was staged the following year in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and some provincial theaters and enjoyed massive success, but after 1870 was virtually banned and got revived on stage only in the late 1890s.
Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich (1868,
Vestnik Evropy) was banned from being produced on stage personally by Interior minister Timashev; as late as 1907 censors deemed the play "inappropriate."
Tsar Boris (1870,
Vestnik Evropy) received no official ban, but the Directorial council of the
Imperial Theatres refused to sanction its production.
Later life , 1896. Tolstoy was a lenient land-owner, admired by his Krasny Rog peasants who were permitted to use his fields as common pastures and given free timber and primary education for their children in a school he built for them in 1859. In 1861 he personally gathered all of his peasants together, read them the
Emancipation reform of 1861 decree, gave money to everybody present and participated in the grandiose drinking spree that followed. Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy died on 28 September 1875, in Krasny Rog,
Chernigov Governorate, after having given himself a lethal injection of morphine. He was buried in the family vault in the Uspenskaya Church in Krasny Rog. == Legacy ==