"The circumstances of Alexei Tolstoy's birth parallel in striking resemblance those of another relative, Alexei Constantinovich, the great lyric poet, after whom he was named. His father had been a rake--hell cavalry officer, whose rowdy excesses proved too much even for his fellow hussars. He was obliged to leave his regiment and the two capital cities, and retired to an estate in Samara, Russia. There he met and married Alexandra Leontievna Turgenev, a lively girl of good family, but slender means. She bore him two sons, Alexander and Mstislav, and a daughter Elizabeth. But the wild blood of the Tolstoys did not allow him to settle down to an existing domestic harmony. Within a year the retired hussar had been exiled to Kostroma for insulting the Governor of Samara. When strings were eventually pulled to arrange his return, he celebrated it by provoking a fellow-noble to a duel. This was more than his high-spirited wife could stand. She found life intolerable with the turbulent Count and inevitably fell in love with a staid, kindly young gentleman of suitably liberal and anti-aristocratic proclivities, named Alexei Appollonovich Bostrom. In May 1882, already two months pregnant with her fourth child, Alexandra fled into the arms of her lover. The scandal that followed was appalling. The Count loosed off his revolver at Bostrom and was exculpated by the courts, whilst the ecclesiastical court in granting a divorce ruled that the guilty wife should never be allowed to remarry. In order to keep the expected baby, Alexandra was compelled to assert that it was Bostrom's child. Ostracized by society and even for some years by her own parents, she left with her lover for Nikolaevsk, where he held a modest post in local government."

"As with so many Russian children at that time, little Alexei picked up his earliest education at home. There were lessons with his not over-strict tutor, his mother taught him to read and write, and his step-father read aloud to them in the evenings from the writings of Tolstoy and Turgenev (to both of whom Alexei was related through his parents). His attention was perfunctory, and in his earliest years it was his imagination and dreams which absorbed his energy. His mother was an amateur writer and poetess of modest abilities but infectious enthusiasm. When he was ten, she urged Alexei to write stories. He did so, and both were delighted to find how easily prose flowed from his pen, despite his inattentiveness at formal instruction. His mother's encouragement bore swift fruit, and with every year his talent became more apparent."

"In 1896, the fourteen year old boy was sent to school, and in the following year he attended the high school in Samara. There he studied physics, chemistry, engineering, and other more practical subjects than he would have learned had he attended the aristocratic gymnasium. That he resented the unjust discrepancy is attested by his adoption of his true surname.

"With angry sweeps of his broom, he dispelled the dreary world of petit-bourgeois existence, and drew me into the world of the Great Man."

"Thanks to the unexpected legacy received from his real father, who had died abroad the previous year, Alexei was now able to take up further studies in St. Petersburg. Eager to join the exciting throng of student life, he enrolled in a coaching establishment outside the city. Overcoming his former lethargy, he was soon studying for thirteen hours a day. By September, he had applied himself sufficiently to obtain a place at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute. After the intensive work required to enter, he found life there delightfully free and easy. Attendance at lectures was not compulsory at any case, and increasing political unrest caused alternating student strikes and police closure to disrupt whatever work was in progress. To a boy from Alexei Tolstoy's sheltered upbringing, it was all intoxicatingly exciting. Like most of his comrades, he was hostile to the government and spent much time in heated political discussions. On 12 February 1902, he took part in a protest march on Nevsky Prospekt which was broken up by police and Cossacks, and he was enrolled in the Institute's Social Democratic Party. He was popular with the students, who elected him to their committees. But his enthusiasm for politics was perfunctory and eclectic, and when the Social Democratic Party split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, he joined neither grouping. He was essentially a liberal humanist at this impressionable stage of his life. He intensely dislike the existing social system, but though Socialist promises of a coming society as terrestrial heaven too absurd for contemplation."

"After returning to St. Petersburg from their love-nest, the young couple took the well trodden path to the Russian Mecca, Paris. Whilst there, he heard from Julia that his three year old son had died of meningitis, the same dreadful scourge that had struch down his mother. Sophia claimed in a pious official memoir published in Moscow in 1973 that Alexei, 'took the child's death very much to heart.' One may question this. The father, after all, made no attempt to visit his ailing son before his lonely end, nor did he return for the funeral (though he did make another, business journey to Petersburg from Paris). As subsequent events were to show, he could evince extraordinary callousness toward individual members of the human race, whatever his broadly liberal viewpoint toward the species at large."

"Alexei was at pains to stress his Russian origin, appearing everywhere in a in a fur coat and hat. When spring arrived, he took to more resplendent garb, sporting a top hat and English frock coat. He was beginning to relish the belated discovery that there were distinct advantages to being Count Alexei Tolstoy, now that he was among people who knew nothing of his humiliated upbringing. It was a happy time. Russian poets and painters crowded Paris, and long and noisy sessions continued deep into the night at the restaurant Closerie de Lilas. There Tolstoy came to know the poet Constantine Balmont, the painter Elizabeth Kruglikova, and the writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Maximilian Voloshin. In August, he wrote to his stepfather that his continued success in writing had earned him extraordinary acclaim among the Paris Russians. The only sour note was scarcely a fair one, 'With such a name, he ought to do better.' Voloshin more shrewdly suggested that Alexei, with his real talent, could profit by it. 'You know, you are an extremely talented and interesting man,' he ventured one day. 'You certainly ought to be the one to carry on the old tradition of the literary, "nest of gentlefolk,"' Tolstoy, he added, should achieve a suitable style and write a massive epic."

"Usuallly ... Alexei Nikolaevich read them to me, avoiding the presence of visitors. But this time, he was so thrilled with his stories, and so proud of them, that he did not wait for the departure of our guest (a waitress) but came out of his study with the manuscript in his hands and straight into the dining room and, resting his elbows on the back of a chair, stood reading the story. We both responded enthusiastically."

"Despite these triumphs, the couple's home life was entering on a troubled period. On holiday in the Crimea in the spring of 1914, Alexei became greatly drawn to a young ballerina, Margarita Kandaurov. The break with Sophia was as abrupt as it had been with Julia. Out on a stroll, Alexei said significantly, 'I feel that this winter you're going to leave me.' Sophia did not reply, but took the hint and departed for another visit to Paris. The baby Mariana was deposited with an aunt. The outbreak of war in August caused Sophia to return to Russia, but though his seventeen year old ballerina soon left him, he and his mistress lived separate lives thereafter. Mariana, however, came to live with her father two years later. By December, Tolstoy had established himself with another mistress, Natalia Vasilievna Volkenstein, who was separated from her husband. They did not marry until after the February Revolution, as Natalia was unable to secure a divorce.

"The city was crowded with Russian refugees of every type and class. Princes and generals swept streets, waited on cafes and, if they were lucky, drove taxi. The Tolstoys were no exception amid the general misery. Staying at first with friends, and later in a flat crowded with other Russians, they were totally dependent on what work Natalia could find as a seamstress. Alexei was greatly depressed at this life of privation, which was not many degrees better than that which they had left Moscow to escape. He missed acutely the old life of ease and amusement. The Revolution had come at just the wrong moment. After years of struggle, he had begun to achieve artistic recognition and material success, while here he was worse off than he had been in 1908, when he had only a hundred roubles in the world. Now, as then, he found his refuge in, 'the troubled waters of literature.'"

"There was a place in Berlin that reminded one of Noah's Ark, where the clean and unclean met peacefully; it was called the House of Arts and was just a common German cafe where Russian writers gathered on Fridays. Stories were read aloud by Tolstoy, Remizov, Lidin, Pilnyak, Sokolov-Mikitov. Mayakovsky declaimed. Yesenin, Marina Tsvetayeva, Andrei Bely, Pasternak, Khodasevich recited poetry... On one occasion, E. Chirikov came in, sat down next to Mayakovsky, and listened quietly. Today this strikes me as almost incredible. Two or three years later, the poet Khodasevich (to say nothing of Chirikov) would not have dreamt of entering a place where Mayakovsky was present. Apparently, not all the dice had been cast yet. There were people who called Gorky the 'semi emigre'. Khodasevich, who later worked on the monarchist newspaper Vozrozhdeniye (Regeneration), edited a literary journal with Gorky and talked of going back to Russia. Alexey Tolstoy, surrounded by Smena Vekh (Change of Landmark) people, alternately praised the Bolsheviks as, 'unifiers of the Russian land,' and indulged in angry abuse. The fog was still swirling."

"Alexey Tolstoy sat in silent gloom puffing at his pipe, then, suddenly appeased, he would break into a smile. He once said to me, 'You'll see, no literature will come out of the emigration. Emigration can kill any author within two or three years.' He knew that he would soon be going home."

"I am leaving with my family for the homeland forever. If there are people here abroad close to me, my words are addressed to them. Do I go to happiness? Oh, no: Russia is going through hard times. Once again she is enveloped by a wave of hatred... I am going home to a hard life."

"In fact, he never experienced the 'hard life' of which he wrote, and it seems certain that he never expected to do so. Clearly, he would not have contemplated return without the motives already noted: a profound patriotism and nostalgie de la boue. It was probably Mayakovsky who finally persuaded him to take the crucial step in Berlin, together with overtures from members of the Soviet diplomatic mission. (Some fifteen years ago, I received a similarly flattering invitation from a high Soviet official). They would certainly have assured him as to the social status that an artist would enjoy in a society where the artist was for the first time freed from the degrading shackles of bourgeois patronage. On a more prosaic note it was clear that Mayakovsky and artists like him enjoyed a comfortable standard of life, unaffected by the appalling tribulations suffered by ordinary Russians."

"Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy's life remains in large part an enigma... It is not hard to believe that the degrading personal role he undertook in Soviet society exerted a damaging effect on his creative capacity. His personal character was without question beneath contempt, reflecting as it did the pitiful morality of many contemporary European intellectuals. His friend Ilya Ehrenburg wrote once that Tolstoy would do anything for a quiet life, and his personal philosophy rose no higher than this confessio vitae, uttered when an exile in Paris: 'I only know this: the thing that I loathe most of all is walking in town with empty pockets, looking in shop windows without the possibility of buying anything -- that's real torture for me.' There was no lie, betrayal, or indignity which he would no hasten to commit in order to fill those empty pockets, and in Stalin he found a worthy master. Few families have produced a higher literary talent than Leo Tolstoy, but few have sunk to one as degraded as Alexei Nikolaevich."

• Lirika, a poetry collection (1907)
• The Ordeal (1918)
• Nikita's Childhood (1921)
• The Road to Calvary, a trilogy (1921—40, Stalin Prize in 1943)
• Aelita (1923)
• The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (aka The Garin Death Ray) (1926)
• Peter I (1929—34, Stalin Prize in 1941)
• A Week in Turenevo (published posthumously, 1958)
• Count Cagliostro (supernatural short story)