Alexei Nikolaevich
Tolstoy
1883-1945
Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy was a novelist, poet, playwright, publicist and one of the greatest Russian writers of the 20th century. He is the author of the novels “Peter the First”, “Aelita” and “The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin”, the novel-epic “The Walk of Mukami”, the fairy tale “The Golden Key or The Adventures of Buratino”, a number of novels, short stories, plays and journalistic works. He was the winner of three Stalin prizes of the first degree. Alexei Tolstoy was born on 10 January, 1883 in Nikolaevsk, the Samara governorate (now Pugachev, Saratov region). Childhood years of the future writer passed in a small estate of A. A. Bostrom on the farm Sosnovka, not far from Samara (now – Pavlovka settlement, Krasnoarmeysky district). In the spring of 1905, as a student of the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology, Alexei Tolstoy was sent to the Urals for practice, where he lived for more than a month in Nevyansk. He went on to study engineering in Dresden. In the First World War he was a war correspondent. In 1916 he travelled to France and England. After the October Revolution, in 1918-1923, Alexei Tolstoy was in exile. He returned to the USSR in 1923. n 1927 he took part in writing the collective novel “Great Fires”, published in the magazine “Ogonyok”. At the First Congress of Writers in 1934 he gave a report on dramaturgy. He participated in the First (in 1935) and the Second (in 1937) Congresses of Writers in Defence of Culture. In 1936-1938, after the death of A. M. Gorky, Alexei Nikolaevich headed the Union of Writers of the USSR. He was a member of the Commission to investigate the atrocities of the fascist occupiers. He was present at the Krasnodar trial. He was one of the actual co-authors of the famous Molotov-Stalin address of 1941, in which Soviet leaders called on the people to turn to the experience of great ancestors – Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Minin and Pozharsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov. In 1957 a granite plaque was placed on the house where Alexei Tolstoy lived and worked. The sculptor is Sergei Merkurov, the architect Isidor Frantsuz.
Address: Moscow, Spiridonovka str., 4, building 1
