Aleksei Tolstoy: To Play Oneself

Aleksei Varlamov — a prose writer, philologist, author of several biographies of writers, as well as novels, including My Soul Paul and The Thoughtful Wolf. Winner of literary awards — Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize, Big Book Prize and Student Booker. Aleksei Tolstoy, a prose writer known to everyone since childhood, turns out to be quite different from how readers perceive him. An émigré and a patriot, a statesman and an anarchist, an egoist and an exemplary family man — a figure full of contradictions and therefore endlessly interesting… I did not love my hero when I began writing this book. I knew that his background was dark, that he was a crafty defector who betrayed the high ideals of the Russian emigration and became one of the brightest ideologists of the Soviet regime. I was prepared to expose and condemn him… But Aleksei Tolstoy defeated me, forcing me to reconsider the most clichéd literary myths. I saw not only a talented belly prose writer, but — a broad Russian person, passionate, unable to imagine his life outside of Russia, a stubborn statesman, a patriot, a cosmopolitan, an anarchist, a master of life, a gambler, a husband, a father, endlessly in love with life, which generously paid him back with mutual love. Aleksei Varlamov