Aleksei Tolstoy

She married Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoy (1849–1900), a member of the aristocratic Tolstoy family and a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy.

Aleksey claimed that Count Tolstoy was his biological father, which allowed him to style himself as a Count, but since his mother had taken a lover and left her husband before he was born, not all of his contemporaries believed him.

Tolstoy's mother Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva (1854–1906) was a grand-niece of Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev and a relative of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev.

Tolstoy's adoptive father was a liberal landowner, who had supported the emancipation of Russian serfs in the 1860s.

His mother wrote children's stories, using the pseudonym Alexander Bostrom.

Due in part to their rejection by both the Russian nobility and the Church, Aleksey grew up in a staunchly atheistic and anti-monarchist environment, and was encouraged to be creative.

He was home taught by his parents, and by a visiting tutor, until the age of 14, when the family moved to Samara, after selling their farm, and he was enrolled in a local school.

According to author and historian Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative:"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. Alexandra fell in love with Alexei Appollonovich Bostrom. In May 1882, already two months pregnant with her fourth child, she fled into the arms of her lover.

The Count threatened Bostrom with a revolver but was exculpated by the courts.

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."

What is known is that Bostrom brought the boy up as his own child, on his family farm in Samara province, and that he was known in his childhood and in his teens as Aleksey Bostrom.

In Dresden, he met Sofia Dymshitz (1889-1963), who had recently married another emigre student named Isaac Rosenfeld (1879-1978).

She and Tolstoy became lovers, and returned to rent a shared apartment in St Petersburg, where she took up painting.

Count Nikolai Tolstoy died in 1900, leaving a will from which Aleksey received 30,000 rubles.

This allowed him to move to St Petersburg, where he studied at the Technological Institute St Petersburg in 1901-06.

In June 1902 he married a fellow student, Julia Rozhansky, the daughter of a provincial doctor.

According to Nikolai Tolstoy, he took part in a student protest on 12 February 1902 along Nevsky Prospekt, which was broken up by police and Cossacks, and joined the Social Democratic Party, but there does not appear to be any corroboration for this account of his student radicalism.

Their son, Yuri, was born in 1903.

He avoided becoming involved in the 1905 Revolution, by moving to Dresden in February 1906, to enrol in the Royal Saxon Higher School after the government temporarily closed the Technological Institute.

In 1907 Tolstoy broke off his studies to dedicate himself to writing.

The couple decided to emigrate in 1907, and arrived in Paris in January 1908, to join a wide network of emigre Russian writers and artists, including Nikolay Gumilyov, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Andrei Bely, Maximilian Voloshin.

He and Gumilyov launched a periodical that folded after one issue for lack of funds.

Tolstoy's first book of poems, Lyric, was published in 1907, at his own expense, but in later life he was embarrassed by it and preferred to forget it.

His second poetry collection, Beyond the Blue Rivers (1908) was his last.

In a letter to his adoptive father, he complained that the name 'Tolstoy' meant that people had high expectations of him, though Voloshin suggested to him that it was an advantage.

In 1908, he learnt from his ex-wife that their son had died from meningitis.

According to Nikolai Tolstoy,

Aleksey and Sophia returned to St Petersburg in January 1909.

(Her sister in law, Bella Rosenfeld, married Marc Chagall) Tolstoy's wife agreed to a divorce, which was finalised in 1910, but Rosenfeld always refused to divorce Dymshitz.

One young poet he met mistook him for Leo Tolstoy, who had died in 1910 aged 82.

By 1910 his success as a writer enabled them to move into a flat along Nevsky Prospekt, but because of her husband's refusal to grant a divorce, when she became pregnant, she returned to Paris in May 1911, where he joined her, so that he could be registered under French law as the father of their daughter, Marianna.

They returned to St Petersburg later in the year, but moved to Moscow in 1912.

In the summer of 1914 Tolstoy and Dymshitz took a vacation in Koktebel, Crimea, where he met a 17 year old ballerina named Margarita Kandaurova.

Despite having opposed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, he was able to return to Russia six years later and live a privileged life as a highly paid author, reputedly a millionaire, who adapted his writings to conform to the line laid down by the communist party.

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Алексей Николаевич Толстой; – 23 February 1945) was a Russian writer whose works span across many genres, but mainly belonged to science fiction and historical fiction.

The Nobel Prize winning author Ivan Bunin, who knew him as a young man, wrote in his diary, on 23 February 1953: "Aldanov said that Alyosha Tolstoy himself told him that he, T., bore the surname Bostrom until the age of 16 and then went to see his imaginary father, Count Nick Tolstoy, and begged to legitimize him."

"Sophia claimed in a pious official memoir published in Moscow in 1973 that Alexey, '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."

Nikolai Tolstoy wrote in 1983 that "The break with Sophia was as abrupt as it had been with Julia. Out on a stroll, Aleksey 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."

When he was 13, his mother began a lawsuit to have him recognized as the son of Count Tolstoy, which eventually he was on his 17th birthday, after which he was entitled to style himself as Count Tolstoy.