The Son of Tolstoy. A Story of the Life of Lev Lvovich Tolstoy

"My fate is special and I am special," wrote Lev Lvovich Tolstoy in 1915 in a letter to his mother. The son of the great writer, he desperately sought to find his own voice, but he succeeded little in this: during his lifetime, Lev Lvovich - a writer, playwright, sculptor, journalist - could expect interest in himself primarily as Tolstoy's junior. His own projects remained unrealized, his marriage to the Swede Dora Westerlund ended in failure, and the 1917 revolution forever separated him from Russia. In his book, Ben Hellman reconstructs the complex and dramatic biography of Lev Lvovich, which included and coexisted with admiration for the West and Great Russian chauvinism, revolutions and wars, periods of plenty and extreme need, years of optimism and despair. The author used a wealth of sources, including the correspondence of Tolstoy's junior with his father, the autobiography "An Experience of My Life", the unpublished manuscript by Pavel Tolstoy "The Life of Mama Dora Tolstoy", partially based on letters from Dora Westerlund to her parents in Sweden. Ben Hellman is an emeritus associate professor at the University of Helsinki, the author of the books "Tale and Reality: The History of Russian Children's Literature" (2016) and "Northern Guests of Leo Tolstoy" (2021), published by the "NLO" publishing house.