Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy

• 1. Introduction

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  Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy died on the 28th of September 1875 at his Krasny Rog estate, having administered a lethal dose of morphine to himself. He left behind a trilogy of historical dramas, a body of lyric poetry that Tchaikovsky called "an unfathomable well of poems crying for music," and a satirical pen name so vivid that readers debated whether Kozma Prutkov was a real person. Who was this count who befriended Russia's future tsar as a child, met Goethe at the age of nine, and spent his adult life being condemned simultaneously by the radical press as a reactionary and by the authorities as a revolutionary? How did a man embedded in the highest circles of imperial power become one of its most barbed critics? And what made his dramatic trilogy, banned and suppressed for decades, endure long enough to be called the most important nineteenth-century contribution to Russian historical drama?

• 2. A Childhood at Court

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  Aleksey was born in Saint Petersburg into a family dense with literary and political history. His mother, Anna Alekseyevna Perovskaya, was an illegitimate daughter of Count Aleksey Kirillovich Razumovsky, himself an heir to the legendary Ukrainian hetman Alexey Razumovsky. His father, Count Konstantin Petrovich Tolstoy, was a son of an army general and a councilor of the Russian Assignation Bank. The parents divorced in October 1817, when Aleksey was only six weeks old, and Anna took the infant first to her Blistava estate in Chernigov Governorate, then to Krasny Rog, the estate of her brother Aleksey Perovsky.

  Perovsky, who published fiction under the pen name Antony Pogorelsky, became the boy's tutor and lifelong companion. By family tradition, Pogorelsky's fantasy fairytale The Black Chicken or The People of the Underground was first read aloud at home, with young Aleksey as its sole audience. Under his uncle's influence, Aleksey started writing poetry as early as 1823. He spoke French, German, and English fluently by age six, and later added Italian.

  In early 1826, Anna returned to Saint Petersburg with her son, and the court connection opened an extraordinary door. In August of that year, Aleksey was officially designated "a comrade in games" for the young Crown Prince, the future Alexander II. His duties included visits to the Crown Prince in Saint Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo, walks on Yelagin Island, and participation in games that were, in effect, small-scale military exercises. That friendship persisted for several decades, only fraying in the mid-1860s. In the autumn of 1826, just as that bond was forming, Aleksey met Aleksandr Pushkin for the first time.

• 3. Goethe's Gift and European Formation

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  In summer 1827, the family traveled to Germany, and in Weimar young Aleksey met Goethe. The great man greeted the boy warmly and gave him a fragment of a mammoth tusk bearing Goethe's own drawing of a frigate. Aleksey later admitted in his autobiography that awe had largely erased the memory: "Only his magnificent features and the way he took me upon his lap." The family spent the next decade in nearly continuous travel across Russia and Europe.

  An 1831 trip to Italy left a particularly deep mark on the thirteen-year-old. Writing decades later he recalled falling into a deep nostalgic depression on returning to Russia, crying at night when dreams carried him back to what he called "this Paradise lost." In Italy the family met the painter Karl Bryullov, and on the 10th of May 1831 Aleksey noted in his diary: "Bryullov dined with us and left a sketch in my album." Bryullov promised to paint portraits of all three of them, but five years later had finished only one, of Perovsky.

  This saturation in European culture and art shaped an outlook Tolstoy never abandoned. He saw Russia as a European country and Russians as Europeans, a conviction that would set him permanently at odds with the Slavophile movement he briefly flirted with and the nationalist currents that dominated Russian cultural life for much of his career.

• 4. First Steps in Literature

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  In 1834 Tolstoy enrolled in the Moscow Foreign Ministry State Archive as a student, getting his first direct experience with historical documents. In December 1835 he passed exams at the University of Moscow covering English, French, and German languages and literature, Latin, World and Russian history, and Russian statistics, earning his formal first-grade state bureaucrat certificate. He then moved into the Economic Affairs and Statistics Department in Saint Petersburg.

  Before taking that position, he buried his uncle Aleksey Perovsky in July 1836. Perovsky died of tuberculosis in Warsaw, and Aleksey inherited the Krasny Rog estate that had been his childhood home. That same year, 1835, he had shown new poems to the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, who praised them, and there is evidence that Pushkin too approved of the young writer's early work.

  Tolstoy was in no rush to publish. "My first experiments were, no doubt, absurd, but at least metrically they were flawless. I went on training thus for many years, before I debuted... as a prose writer, not a poet," he recalled. When he did debut, it was with a gothic novella. In May 1841, The Vampire appeared under the pen name "Krasnorogsky", a nod to Krasny Rog. The critic Vissarion Belinsky praised its "obviously still very young, but undoubtedly gifted author," entirely unaware of the true identity behind the pseudonym. Tolstoy himself regarded the piece as minor and never included it in later compilations; it was only reissued in 1900. Two years later, in the autumn of 1843, his poem "Serebryanka" appeared in the No. 40 edition of Listok Dlya Svetskikh Lyudey, marking his public debut as a poet.

• 5. Kozma Prutkov and Satirical Mischief

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  In the early 1850s, Tolstoy collaborated with the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers to create one of Russian literature's most successful fictional personas: Kozma Prutkov, a petty bureaucrat of thundering self-importance who parodied the poetry of the day and dispensed memorably banal aphorisms. Prutkov was not simply a collective pseudonym; the collaborators treated him as a character who performed pranks in the real world. One notorious stunt involved sending a messenger to all the leading Saint Petersburg architects late at night with the urgent false news that the Isaakiyevsky Cathedral had collapsed, urging them to appear at the Tsar's court early the next morning. They hastily appeared, to Nikolay I's considerable annoyance.

  Prutkov's theatrical debut came on the 8th of January 1851, when The Fantasy, a comedy signed "Y" and "Z" and written by Tolstoy and Aleksey Zhemchuzhnikov, premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. The farce featured a dozen small dogs running across the stage at one point, caused a major scandal, and was promptly banned by Nikolay I, who was in the audience. It remained unpublished until 1884.

  Also in 1851, Tolstoy met Sophia Andreyevna Miller at a Bolshoy Theater masquerade. She was then the wife of a cavalry colonel, a woman who knew fourteen languages and whom Tolstoy later described as his harshest and most objective critic and the best friend he had ever had. He fell in love immediately but had to wait twelve years before they could marry. All of his love lyrics from 1851 onward were written for and about Sophia, and many were set to music by leading Russian composers, becoming famous romances.

• 6. War, Court, and the Break for Literature

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  When the Crimean War broke out, Tolstoy's first plan was to raise a partisan fighting unit and lead it to the Baltic coast in case the English landed there. Together with Count Aleksey Bobrinsky, who would later become Minister of Transport, he financed and equipped two partisan squads of forty fighters each, bought ammunition from Tula, and traveled the Baltic coastline to survey his potential theater of war, all without the Crown Prince's knowledge. The allies' landing at Yevpatoria on the 2nd of September redirected his plans, and in March 1855 Tolstoy headed south to join the Imperial infantry regiment under the command of Lev Perovsky as an army major.

  The regiment traveled only as far as Odessa, where a thousand men were lost to typhoid. In February 1856 Tolstoy himself became a casualty, and Sophia Miller nursed him back to health in Odessa while Alexander II requested daily telegrams on his old friend's condition. After the war Alexander II appointed Tolstoy as one of his personal aides-de-camp on the day of his Coronation in 1856. It took Tolstoy three more years to shed this obligation, which required regular palace duties that ate into his writing time.

  He quit court service entirely in 1861, writing to a disappointed Alexander II: "For quite some time I was under the illusion that I'd be able to suppress my artistic nature but life taught me different; this struggle was futile. Service and the arts are incompatible." He used his remaining access to the palace not for advancement but for advocacy. In 1862 he lobbied for Ivan Aksakov, who had been banned from editing his newspaper. In 1863 he helped Ivan Turgenev escape a period of exile. In 1864 he appealed directly to Alexander II on behalf of the imprisoned writer Chernyshevsky, telling the Tsar that all of Russia had gone into mourning for him. The monarch's reply ended forty years of friendship: "No, Tolstoy, I beg you never to remind me of Chernyshevsky, please."

• 7. The Historical Trilogy

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  Modeled after Pushkin's Boris Godunov, Tolstoy's dramatic trilogy examined three consecutive reigns in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: The Death of Ivan the Terrible, Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, and Tsar Boris. The first play was published in 1866 in Otechestvennye Zapiski magazine and staged the following year in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and several provincial theaters, winning massive popular success. After 1870 it was effectively banned and did not return to the stage until the late 1890s. Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, published in 1868 in Vestnik Evropy, was banned from production by Interior Minister Timashev personally; as late as 1907, censors still deemed it "inappropriate." Tsar Boris, also published in Vestnik Evropy in 1870, received no official ban, but the Directorial council of the Imperial Theatres refused to sanction its staging.

  The plays shared a darkly coherent thesis: that autocratic power in Russia was structurally tragic, that efficient rulers had tended to be evil and good-hearted rulers tended to be impotent. The three finales gave voice to this directly. Over Ivan the Terrible's dead body Zakharyin says, "God help you, Tsar Ivan, and God forgive us all! That's the fate autocracy deserved!" Tsar Fyodor cries, "I am to blame for all of this... Oh God, why did you make me Tsar?!" Boris Godunov concludes, "What Evil spawns is only more evil and nothing else."

  Tolstoy himself was explicit that historical accuracy was not his governing criterion. "A poet... has just one responsibility: to his own poetic self... human truth is his one law. Historical truth is something he is not bound to," he wrote. D. S. Mirsky rated him as a dramatist superior to Aleksander Ostrovsky, and the character of Tsar Fyodor, described by critic Yuly Aykhenvald as "an epitome of Christian meekness and grace," was called by Vladimir Korolenko "a gem of Russian drama." The trilogy eventually entered the permanent repertoire of the Maly Theatre, with stars including Ivan Moskvin and Nikolai Khmelyov in leading roles, and remained politically charged right up to the 1917 Revolution, when monarchists and leftists in the Alexandrinsky Theatre audience applauded different characters in Tsar Boris for diametrically opposed reasons.

• 8. Poetry, Isolation, and Final Years

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  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. The composer wrote: "Tolstoy is the unfathomable well of poems crying for music. For me he is one of the most attractive poets." In 1867 Tolstoy published Poems, the only comprehensive collection of his verse issued in his lifetime, gathering 131 pieces.

  His approach to versification was deliberately unconventional. He used what critics called "bad rhymes" consciously, comparing the technique in an 1859 letter to the Venetian school of painting, where small imperfections achieved effects that Raphael's precision could not. Critic Nikolay Strakhov wrote in 1867 that Tolstoy's verse was "so simple it hardly rises above prose, yet the poetic impression it carries is perfectly full." D. S. Mirsky assessed him as the "least tragic, least disharmonious of the Russian poets," whose harmony had "nothing to do with complacency or self-righteousness. It is clean and noble."

  By the mid-1860s Tolstoy was referring to himself as an "anchorite," retreating to his Pustynka property near Saint Petersburg and to Krasny Rog while his finances deteriorated toward bankruptcy. He entered the 1870s suffering from asthma, angina pectoris, neuralgias, and severe headaches. In the spring of 1875 he began taking morphine. Writing to the poet Karolina Pavlova, who translated his dramas, on the 8th of July 1875, he noted that his neuralgia had improved but that his asthma fits were continuous and he had never before been so short of breath. He died that September. His last major unfinished play, Posadnik, set during the era of the Novgorod Republic, was published in Vestnik Evropy in 1876, the year after his death, with portions having appeared in the 1874 charity almanac Skladchina during his lifetime.