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Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi (Russian: Алексей Николаевич Толстой) (January 10 1883 (December 29 1882 (O.S.)) - February 23 1945), nicknamed the Comrade Count, was a Soviet Russian writer who was most famous for science fiction and historical novels.

He was born in Nikolaevsk (now Pugachyov, Saratov Oblast) in 1883 into an impoverished branch of the Counts Tolstoy. His father was a count N.A.Tolstoi and his mother was a children's writer A.L.Bostrom (born Turgeneva). Aleksei Tolstoi left Russia in 1917 during the Bolshevik revolution but changed his political beliefs (he became a supporter of Communist Party until the end of his life) and returned in 1925.

Aleksei Tolstoi is usually crediting with writing first (and some of the best) science fiction in the Russian language. His novels Aelita (1923), about a journey to the Mars, and Engineer Garin's Death Ray (1927) proved popular with teenager public. The former novel spawned a pioneering sci-fi movie in 1924. He also wrote several books for children, notably Nikita's Childhood and the Adventures of Buratino and the Golden Key (1936, it was an adaptation of Italian fairy tales about Pinocchio).

He published two lengthy novels on historical subjects, Peter the First (1929-45), about the Russian reformist tsar, and The Road to Calvary (1922-41), tracking the Russian civil war over the period from 1914 to 1919. He also wrote several plays.

Tolstoi died in Moscow on February 23, 1945

Besides Aelita (1924), there were many movies based on his novels released in the USSR during its existence, some ones were released in the post-Soviet Russia.

After the Collapse of the Soviet Union some sources claim, that several Tolstoi's early short stories, published in the 1910s, were panned by critics for their excessive naturalism and wanton eroticism. While other doubt, if they were actually written by Alexei Tolstoi, as there were few of them and their style differed from what Tolstoi wrote before and after them.

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