Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy

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Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy
Aleksey Nikolaevich Tolstoy Signature.svg

Alexei Nikolayevich Count Tolstoy ( Russian Алексей Николаевич Толстой , scientific. Transliteration Aleksej Nikolaevich Tolstoy ; * December 29, 1882 . Jul / 10. January  1883 greg. Close in Sosnowka Nikolaevsk, Samara Governorate , Russian Empire (now Pugachev , Saratov Oblast , Russia ) ; † February 23, 1945 in Moscow ) was a Russian-Soviet writer . His best-known and constantly reissued book is The Little Golden Key or the Adventures of Burattino , his retelling of the classic Italian children's book Pinocchio . Tolstoy is the grandfather of the contemporary writer Tatiana Nikitichna Tolstaya .

Life

In the tsarist empire

Count Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born to officer Nikolai Alexandrovich Tolstoy, a distant relative of the writer Lev Tolstoy , and Alexandra Leontievna Tolstoy (née Turgeneva) when his parents' divorce proceedings were already underway. While pregnant, his mother left her alcoholic husband to live with the estate manager named Alexei Apollonowitsch Bostrom in his hometown. Contemporaries suspected that this was the child's father. Since the latter was born before the divorce and the count did not contest paternity, the legal situation was clear: the son inherited the title of nobility .

In 1901 Tolstoy went to Saint Petersburg to study mathematics. He continued his studies in Dresden in 1905 . During this time he began to write poetry in the style of Nekrasov and Nadson . In 1907, shortly before graduation, he gave up his studies to devote himself entirely to literature. In 1908 he published his first collection of poems under the title Behind Blue Rivers . His first prose works, written in the style of neo-realism , the short story A Week in Turgenev and the novels The Nerds and The Limping Prince , received positive reviews. Maxim Gorky noticed him and called him a "great and powerful writer".

During the First World War , Tolstoy was a war correspondent in England and France and wrote stories and sketches about the war ( On the Mountain , Under Water , A Wonderful Lady ), but also began to write comedies for the theater.

The October Revolution with the following takeover by the Bolsheviks in 1917 was against Tolstoi initially dismissive. During the civil war he worked in the propaganda department of the White Army under General Anton Ivanovich Denikin . In addition to pamphlets against communism, he wrote one of his most famous works there, the story Nikita's childhood (published in 1922). Tolstoy's nostalgia for old Russia can be clearly felt in this story of a carefree childhood on an estate in the Russian Empire .

emigration

After the defeat of the whites in the civil war, Tolstoy emigrated to Paris in 1919. From there he moved to Berlin in 1921 . The writer Iwan Bunin , who also went into exile in Paris, accused him of having fled to Berlin from his creditors .

In Berlin, Tolstoy joined the Smena Wech movement , a group of Russian emigrants who were ready to accept Bolshevik rule. In the Moscow-funded Berlin-based pro-Soviet daily Nakanune (On the Eve) he published a letter about the need to recognize the new leadership in the Kremlin. There the letter that led to his break with Russian emigration was enthusiastically received. However, this letter was sharply criticized by emigrants. The poet Marina Tsvetaeva accused Tolstoy of turning a blind eye to the terror of the Soviet secret police (GPU). Vladimir Nabokov , with whose father Tolstoy was friends, broke off contact with him.

In the Soviet Union

In 1923 he returned to Russia. First he turned to the genre of science fiction . The novels Aelita (1923) and Mysterious Rays, influenced by HG Wells , date from this period . In the novel Black Friday (later under the title Emigranten ) and the story Black Gold he settled accounts with his compatriots in emigration.

The novel trilogy Der Leidensweg (1922–1941), in which a panorama of Russian society before, during and after the revolution is drawn using the example of an intellectual family, he repeatedly revised according to the ideological requirements of the time. The last version met the criteria of socialist realism, as did the novella Bread (1937), in which he contributed to the falsification of history and the creation of legends by glorifying Stalin's role in the civil war in the defense of the city of Tsaritsyn in 1918.

The novel Peter the Great (1929–1945, incomplete), in which he paints a broad picture of Russian society at the time of Peter the Great , is not so clearly tendentious by literary criticism . Tolstoy was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1941 for the first two volumes , as well as in 1943 for the Passionate Trilogy.

After Maxim Gorki's death in 1936, Tolstoy headed the Writers' Union until 1938 , making him a leading figure in official Soviet literature . Because of his loyalty to the Soviet leadership, he was nicknamed "Red Count". He was elected to the Supreme Soviet , received unlimited credit from the state bank and moved into a manor near Moscow. He filled it with antique furniture and art objects, which he got at symbolic prices from the property of the expropriated and persecuted former ruling class. Service personnel were also available to him.

During the Stalin Purge , Tolstoy signed calls for the execution of the accused, who were named "traitors and spies". He also sat among the spectators at show trials .

During the Second World War he was on the Gestapo's “Special Wanted List USSR” , which included a total of 5,256 names, including Stalin and the other members of the Politburo. During the war, Tolstoy wrote texts and slogans for military training. But in contrast to other writers, he stayed away from the front, he moved into a comfortable house in warm and well-supplied Tashkent . There he was visited by the Polish writer Józef Czapski , who on behalf of the Polish government in exile was looking for officers of the Polish armed forces who had been lost in captivity and asked him for help in the search. So far, however, no evidence has emerged that Tolstoy kept this promise.

In January 1944 he was a member of the " Special Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices" and a commission headed by forensic doctor Nikolai Burdenko , which was supposed to investigate the mass graves of Katyn . Tolstoy was one of the signatories of the report of the Burdenko commission , according to which the "German fascists" murdered the Polish prisoners of war. Russian literary historians also see his participation as a test: Shortly before, Stalin had criticized his novel Peter the Great and the first version of his drama Ivan IV . Tolstoy was therefore expected to do his part to convince Western journalists who came to the Burdenko Commission presentation of the correctness of the Soviet version. His grandson Ivan Tolstoy, literary historian and editor at Radio Liberty in Prague, announced in an article in 2014 that his grandfather had expressed great doubts about the Burdenko Commission's report under the seal of secrecy to his son; rather, he and other members of the commission were thoroughly convinced that the NKVD secret police were responsible .

Tolstoy died on February 23, 1945 and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Posthumously he received the third Stalin Prize in 1946 for the drama Ivan the Terrible . The first draft for it, however, had previously been sharply criticized in the cultural department of the Central Committee: The tsar was portrayed as a procrastinator. Tolstoy then rewrote the text.

Works

  • Хромой барин. Novel, 1910
    • German edition: The limping prince . Translated by Ruth Elisabeth Riedt. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1966.
  • Детство Никиты. Novella, 1920
    • German edition: Nikita's childhood . SWA-Verlag , Berlin 1949
    • German edition: Nikita's childhood . Translated by Cornelius Bergmann . Erich Röth Verlag, Eisenach 1950.
    • German edition: Nikita's childhood . Translated by Maria Hoerll. Deuerlich, Göttingen 1954.
  • Хождение по мукам (The Path of Sorrows). Romantic trilogy, 1921–1941
    • Volume 1: Сёстры. 1921, revised 1925
    • Volume 2: Восемнадцатый год. 1928
      • German edition: The year eighteen . Translated by Maximilian Schick. SWA-Verlag, Berlin 1946.
    • Volume 3: Хмурое утро. 1941
      • German edition: Troubled morning . Translated by Maximilian Schick. SWA-Verlag, Berlin 1947.
  • Аэлита. Roman, 1922
    • German edition: Ae͏̈lita. A Mars novel . Translated by Alexander Eliasberg. AVA, Munich 1924.
    • German edition: Aelita . Translated by Hertha von Schulz. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1957.
  • Похождения Невзорова, или Ибикус. Roman, 1924
    • German edition: Ibykus. The novel of a revolutionary adventurer . Translated by Arnold Wasserbauer. Merlin-Verlag, Heidelberg 1927.
    • German edition: Ibykus . Translated by Christine Patzer. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1956.
  • Гиперболоид инженера Гарина. Roman, 1925, revised 1934, 1936, 1937
    • German edition: The secret of infrared rays . Translated by Arnold Wasserbauer. NDV, Berlin 1927.
    • German edition: Mysterious rays . Translated by Anneliese Bauch. Culture and progress, Berlin 1957.
  • Эмигранты. Roman, 1931
    • German edition: The emigrants . Translated by Felix Loesch. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1956.
  • Пётр Первый (Peter the First). Romantic trilogy, unfinished. 1934-1945
    • Book 1. 1934
      • German edition: Peter the Great . Translated by Wolfgang E. Groeger . Haessel, Leipzig 1931.
      • German edition: Peter the First. Book 1 . Translated by Maximilian Schick. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1950.
    • Book 2nd 1934
      • German edition: Peter the First. Book 2 . Translated by Maximilian Schick. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1951.
    • Book 3. 1945
      • German edition: Peter the First. Book 3 . Translated by Maximilian Schick. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1951.
  • Золотой ключик, или Приключения Буратино. Fairy Tales, 1936 (Russian version of Carlo Collodi 's classic children's book Pinocchio )
    • German edition: The golden key or the adventures of Burattino . Translated by Robert von Radetzky . Holz, Berlin 1947.
  • Хлеб. Roman, 1937
    • German edition: bread. The defense of Tsaritsyn . Translated by Ellen Walden. German State Publishing House, Engels 1939.
    • German edition: bread. Novel from the Russian Civil War . Translated by Paul Kutzner. People and Book, Leipzig 1948.
    • German edition: bread. The defense of Tsaritsyn . Translated by Paul Kutzner, edited by Irene Müller. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1953.
    • Руссҝие народные сказҝи. Russian folk tales told by AN Tolstoy. Translated by Margarete Spady, Publishing House Culture and Progress Berlin 1955

filming

  • Peter's youth by Sergei Gerasimow, DEFA and Gorky film studios, based on the first two parts of the novel Peter the First (1981)

Mars crater and asteroid

After Tolstoy, the Martian crater Alexey Tolstoy and the asteroid (3771) Alexejtolstoj are named.

literature

  • Ilja Ehrenburg : Memoirs. People - Years - Life I 1891-1922 , Munich 1962, pp. 202-216, ISBN 3-463-00511-5 .
  • Harri Jünger: The novel AN Tolstoy "The Year Eighteen" and its critics. In: Zeitschrift für Slawistik , 1958. Issues 2-4.
  • Harri Jünger: Aleksej N. Tolstoj and Georg Büchner, In: Slavic-German interactions , Akademie Verlag Berlin 1969.
  • Emanuel Waegemans: History of Russian Literature from Peter the Great to the Present , Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz 1998, ISBN 3-87940-574-3
  • Thomas Urban : Russian writers in Berlin in the twenties , Berlin: Nicolai 2003, pages 32–45, ISBN 3-89479-097-0
  • Aleksej N. Count Tolstoy , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 32/1958 of July 28, 1958, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of the article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Alexei Nikolajewitsch Tolstoy  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ S. Bystrova: Rod Tolstych. Novye materialy i issledovanija. Moscow 1995, p. 157.
  2. ↑ Jürgen Rühle: Literature and Revolution. The writers and communism. Cologne / Berlin 1960, p. 121.
  3. ↑ Ivan Bunin: Sobranie sočinenij v devjati tomach. T. IX. Moscow 1967, pp. 432-434.
  4. ↑ Russica 1981. Literaturnyj sbornik. Ed. Aleksandr Sumerkin. New York 1982, p. 348.
  5. ↑ Vladimir Nabokov: Strong Opinions. New York 1973, p. 85.
  6. ↑ Aleksej Varlamov: Aleksej Tolstoj. Moscow 2008, p. 300.
  7. ↑ Russkie pisateli Berline v v 20-e gody XX veka. St. Petersburg 2014, pp. 198-199.
  8. ↑ Arkady Vaksberg : Stalin's prosecutor. The life of Andrei Vyshinsky. New York 1991, pp. 108, 122.
  9. ↑ Józef Czapski: Na nieludzkiej ziemi . Warsaw 1990, pp. 239-242.
  10. ↑ Natalia S. Lebiediewa, Komisja Specjalna i jej przewodniczący Burdenko, in: Zeszyty Katyńskie , 23 (2008), p. 76.
  11. ^ Benedikt Sarnov: Stalin i pisateli. Kniga Vtoraja. Moscow 2008, pp. 10-15, 216-217.
  12. ↑ Nesostojavšijsja zagovor , svoboda.org, April 28, 2014.
  13. ^ Benedikt Sarnov: Stalin i pisateli. Kniga Vtoraja. Moscow 2008, pp. 10-15, 216-217.
personal data
SURNAME Tolstoy, Alexei Nikolayevich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tolstoy, Alexei Nikolajewitsch Graf; Толстой, Алексей Николаевич (Russian); Tolstoj, Aleksej Nikolaevič (scientific transliteration)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Sosnovka near Nikolayevsk (today Pugachev )
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1945
Place of death Moscow