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organized revolutionary elite. A temporary dic-
tatorship would follow armed overthrow of the
old order, but it would wither away once people
had been educated in socialism. On other issues
he remained a populist, believing that Russia
needed to avoid going through the capitalist
stage and that revolution could occur in Russia
first, rather than in industrialized countries, as
Marxists had argued. Sensing the imminent
emergence of capitalism in Russia, Tkachev made
insistent calls for immediate revolution by an
organized revolutionary minority; this urgency,
some believe, became despair and ultimately
accounted for the insanity that claimed the last
years of his life.
trilogy written between 1919 and 1941, is a por-
trayal of the middle-class intelligentsia through
the years of World War I and the 1917 Revolu-
tions. The second,
Peter I
(
Petr Pervyi
), begun in
1929 and unfinished at the time of his death, is
also a masterpiece of historical re-creation. It
attracted the attention of
STALIN
, who seeing
himself in Peter and the Soviet Union's historical
moment in that of Petrine Russia, lavished great
praise on the topic.
Tolstoy, Lev Nikolaevich
(1828-1910)
(Leo Tolstoy)
writer
Widely considered one of the world's greatest
novelists, Tolstoy imbued his writings with a
strong moral content that greatly influenced his
readers. A count by title, Tolstoy was born into a
prominent aristocratic family and raised at the
family estate in Yasnaya Polyana, to the south of
Moscow. Both his parents died while he was a
child, and he was raised by relatives. After a brief
stay at Kazan University in 1844 and an attempt
at independent study, Tolstoy gave up a formal
education. For the next 15 years he drifted
between managing the family estate, a life of
pleasure in Moscow, and the army. In 1851, Tol-
stoy traveled to the Caucasus to visit his brother
in the army and to enlist as a volunteer. While in
the army, he began to write and published his
first work, the semiautobiographical
Childhood
(1852), to substantial acclaim. Subsequent install-
ments of his autobiography,
Boyhood
(1854) and
Youth
(1857), were equally well received. Tolstoy
served with distinction in the
CRIMEAN WAR
(1853-56), which also provided the context for
some outstanding war journalism, published as
Sebastopol Tales
(1855-56), which praised the
heroism of the common soldier and condemned
war—themes that would surface in later works.
A short novel,
The Cossacks
(1862), also grew
from his years in the Caucasus and the army.
After the war, Tolstoy was seen as the rising star
of Russian literature, but instead he retreated to
Yasnaya Polyana in 1859, where he established a
school for peasant children and managed the
Tolstoy, Aleksei Nikolaevich
(1882-1945)
writer
Born to the same aristocratic family as Lev Tolstoy
and related to Ivan
TURGENEV
on his mother's
side, Aleksei Tolstoy is now best remembered as
the “comrade Count,” because of his support for
the Soviet government after the 1920s. He was
born in Samara province and in the years before
the 1917 Revolution achieved some success with
works that satirized the disintegration of the
Russian nobility. A supporter of the White cause,
he emigrated after the
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
.
While in emigration he completed an autobio-
graphical novel,
Nikita's Childhood
(
Detstvo Nikity
)
(1919-22), which foreshadows the success he
would later have with historical works. Tolstoy
returned to the Soviet Union in 1923, but was
first regarded with some suspicion as a “fellow
traveler.” His published works from the 1920s,
such as the futurist novel
Aelita
(1924) about an
attempt to establish communism on Mars, while
interesting and inventive, did not have the same
resonance as his later realistic work, grounded in
historical events. By the mid-1930s, however, he
was widely praised as an exponent of socialist
realism, next to Maksim
GORKY
and Mikhail
SHOLOKHOV
. Two works in particular account for
his standing in the world of Soviet letters. The
first,
The Road to Calvary (Khozhdenie po mukam),
a
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