Russia A. Tolstoy FDC

Russia FDC
Name: The 125th Anniversary of Birth of A.N. Tolstoy (1883-1945), a writer
Issue date: 2008 January 10th

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Алексей Николаевич Толстой) (January 10, 1883 - February 23, 1945), nicknamed the Comrade Count, was a Russian writer who wrote in many genres but specialized in science fiction and historical novels.

He was born in Nikolaevsk (now Pugachyov, Saratov Oblast) in 1883 into an impoverished branch of the Counts Tolstoi. His father was a retired hussar and landowner, Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoi, and his mother was a children's writer Alexandra Leonievna Bostrom (born Turgeneva, also known as Alexandra Tolstoi). Aleksei was the fourth child in the Tolstoi's family. When his mother was two months pregnant, she fled the family with her lover, Aleksei Apollonovich Bostrom. In accordance with the divorce law of the time, the guilty party (Alexandra) was forbidden to remarry, and the only way for her to keep her newborn son was to register him as a son of Bostrom. Thus, until the age of thirteen, Aleksei had lived under the name of Aleksei Bostrom and had not suspected that Aleksei Bostrom Sr. was not his biological parent. In 1896 both Tolstoyand Bostrom families went into bureaucratic pains to re-register Aleksei as count Tolstoi. Still, he considered Aleksei Bostrom his true father and had hardly ever seen Nikolai Tolstoyand his older siblings. More...