The Voice of Russia ( THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN PHOTOS [ Alexey Tolstoy ] )

ALEXEI TOLSTOY

Alexei Tolstoy was born in 1882. Belonged to the family of Counts Tolstoy. During his 4-decade-long literary career witnessed milestone historic events in Russia and abroad, and depicted them in his novels.

Tolstoy's early stories portray the life of the gentry in their country estates. Then came a big cycle

of stories inspired by the October 1917 bolshevik revolution. The majority of them feature the life of emigrees, including The Viper about a romantic-minded young woman crushed by the civil war and subsequent social changes. Tolstoy's major work of fiction reflecting the revolutionary turmoil is Khozhdeniye Po Mukam (The Road to Calvary).

Another of his epic novels - Peter I - offers a colourful and vivid description of the early 17th century Russia and a gallery of images of Czar Peter and his reformist-minded supporters. Many of Tolstoy's works were filmed, among them his popular tale for children The Golden Key and two science fiction novels: Engineer Garin's Hyperboloid and Aelita.

By the time the Great Patriotic War began Tolstoy was already a prominent writer. A few days after the Nazi invazion, he published an open letter to his numerous readers in the Pravda newspaper. "We are defending our homeland and we will win", the letter said. During the war he wrote a cycle of stories known as Ivan Sudarev's Stories, among them the famous Russian Character. Alexei Tolstoy died in February 1945.