page_title: Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy
section_title: Parentage
hierarchical_section_title: Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy / Life and career / Parentage
caption_attribution_description: English: Alexandra Leontyevna Tolstaya, mother of novelist Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy Русский: Александра Леонтьевна Толстая
context_page_description: Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, nicknamed the Comrade Count, was a Russian and Soviet writer who wrote in many genres but specialized in science fiction and in historical novels.
  During World War II he served on the Extraordinary State Commission of 1942-1947 which "ascertained without reasonable doubt" the mass extermination of people in gas vans by the German occupiers. During the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, Soviet prosecutors recognized his work in the investigation of atrocities committed in the Stavropol region.
context_section_description: Aleksey was the son of Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoy (1849–1900) and Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva (1854–1906). His mother was a grand-niece of Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev and a relative of the renowned Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. His father belonged to the Tolstoy family of Russian nobles and was a remote relative of Leo Tolstoy. According to author and historian Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative:
  The circumstances of Alexei Tolstoy's birth parallel in striking resemblance those of another relative, Alexei Constantinovich, the great lyric poet, after whom he was named. 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. Ostracized by society and even, for some years, by her own parents, she left with her lover for Nikolaevsk, where he held a modest government post.
caption: Alexandra Leontyevna Tolstaya, Aleksey's mother
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