Short answers, pulled from the story.
Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875) was a Russian count, poet, novelist, and playwright, considered the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist. He is best known for his dramatic trilogy comprising The Death of Ivan the Terrible (1866), Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich (1868), and Tsar Boris (1870), as well as for his satirical works published under the fictional pen name Kozma Prutkov.
Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy died on the 28th of September 1875 at his Krasny Rog estate in Chernigov Governorate. He administered a lethal injection of morphine to himself, having begun taking the drug in spring 1875 to manage severe neuralgias, asthma, and angina pectoris. He was buried in the family vault at the Uspenskaya Church in Krasny Rog.
Tolstoy was officially designated "a comrade in games" for the young Crown Prince Alexander in August 1826, and the two became friends for several decades. Alexander II appointed Tolstoy as one of his personal aides-de-camp on the day of his Coronation in 1856. Their friendship ended in 1864 after Tolstoy appealed on behalf of the imprisoned writer Chernyshevsky and the Tsar asked him never to raise the subject again.
Kozma Prutkov was a fictional character created in the early 1850s by Tolstoy in collaboration with the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers. Prutkov was conceived as a pompous petty bureaucrat who parodied contemporary poetry and dispensed banal aphorisms. He was treated as a real persona who performed pranks; his theatrical debut, The Fantasy, premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre on the 8th of January 1851 and was promptly banned by Tsar Nikolay I, who was in the audience.
The trilogy examined three consecutive tsars and argued through its plots that autocratic power in Russia was structurally tragic, with good rulers proving impotent and effective rulers turning cruel. The Death of Ivan the Terrible was effectively banned after 1870. Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich was banned from the stage personally by Interior Minister Timashev and was still deemed "inappropriate" by censors as late as 1907. Tsar Boris, though not officially banned, was refused by the Imperial Theatres' directorial council.
More than half of Tolstoy's poems were set to music by leading Russian composers, including Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Anton Rubinstein, and Rachmaninoff. Tchaikovsky wrote that Tolstoy was "the unfathomable well of poems crying for music" and called him one of his most attractive poets. Many of the poems Tolstoy wrote for Sophia Miller from 1851 onward became famous Russian romances.