97

p Alexei Tolstoi is one of the most widely read Soviet authors, and maybe the best loved. A complete collection of his works was re-published twice in quick succession, and both times more than 600,000 people ordered it in advance. Whatever he writes about Alexei Tolstoi always delights the reader with his easy, flowing style and the gay sparkle of his colourful language. His books make one think over what one has read again and again because, for all 98 the outward variety of his themes, his works present an integral picture of Russian life in the first half of this century.

p Alexei Tolstoi—a writer with the temperament and range of a novelist and playwright, and a flair for journalistic writing, a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. and a member of the Academy of Sciences—looms large as one of the striking figures of our age.

p There is something puzzling about his life story, a sort of riddle to which the answer is right there in his person and his writings. This phenomenon of “Tolstoi solving the riddle of Tolstoi" makes a most absorbing study, giving one a better understanding of many aspects of Soviet life and literature, and the character of its democracy. As an impressive example of continuity in the development of Russian prose in Soviet times, Alexei Tolstoi is second only to Gorky. From Tolstoi’s example it will also be seen how strongly a person’s character and talent can be influenced by his sense of spiritual closeness to his people, by his sense of kinship, and an inner need to be with his country and people at all the stages of its historical course. Tolstoi’s very talent—so full of health and vigour, so versatile and all-embracing—proved equal to those exacting demands which Russian life and literature made on the writers of the first half of this century, particularly after the Great October Socialist Revolution.

p If one were to try and find an explanation of the tremendous vitality of Alexei Tolstoi’s talent which illumines all he has written, his life and his person, one would discover that the answer lies in his organic affinity with the people.

p Alexei Tolstoi (i883-i945)—a big, imposing man with goodbreeding written on his face, and hair worn in a long, straight bob—was the son of a Count. His childhood, however, was spent in the company of village children on a farmstead in the Volga steppeland. This farmstead belonged to the man, a nobleman of modest means, for whom his mother left his father. Tolstoi’s mother—A. L. Bostrem—was the author of two novels, Backwoods and Restless Heart, but was better known as a writer of children’s books. Tolstoi’s childhood impressions were embodied in one of his best and, I am tempted to say, most “fragrant” books—the autobiographical story Nikita’s Childhood (1920, published as a separate edition in 1922).

p Nikita’s Childhood can be ranked with such classics of Russian literature as Aksakov’s Family Chronicle and Lev Tolstoi’s Childhood and Adolescence. It least of all resembles the story of a young aristocrat. It is rather a poetic picture of Russia with her alluring spaces, her fairy tales and legends, a poem of a child’s affirmation of his roots, of his sense of belonging to his native land and people.

p Alexei Tolstoi’s first works were short stories, and then came his 99 novels (The Funny Old Couple, The Lame Prince, Misbka Nalimov and others) which formed a whole cycle under the general title In Volga Country. These novels brought their author far-reaching fame. Their subject matter was the spiritual and material disintegration of the country-seat life under the influence of the prosaic, greedy and cynical worship of Money-Making—the new god of the twentieth century. The heroes of these novels and stories, sketched by Tolstoi with the quick strokes of a fluent pen and shown in a harsh, almost grotesque light, were the impoverished nobility, the fast living scions of once great families, gentlemen who had drifted into blind alleys, “superfluous people" like Prince Alexei Krasnopolsky, the principal character of The Lame Prince, gamblers, duelists, daydreaming young ladies and resentful servants—in short, that motley, spinning Russia in the epoch of crisis and the ripening of revolutionary events.

p In his next stories we find rootless intellectuals, “gentlemen wearing pince-nez”, people in the slough of despondency, citizens without country or family ties, men gambling away their lives, the “Black Friday" men who had tasted the wretchedness of existence in its various combinations and in all parts of the globe. All these characters belong to those years and we can meet them in the books of other European writers too. In Tolstoi’s story The Ancient Route a mortally ill young Frenchman, Paul Torenne, is making his last voyage across the Mediterranean, and, as his ship sails on, visions of ancient civilisations pass in succession before him. He dies with a painfully nostalgic feeling of the senselessness of life. This story brings to mind The Gentleman from San Francisco by Bunin, the true father of the “frustrated generation".

p In Alexei Tolstoi’s pre-revolutionary stories we can easily trace his literary links with his contemporary writers, Russian and foreign, and particularly French writers, like Anatole France and Henri de Regnier. Tolstoi began writing in the period when symbolism held sway in both Russian and European literature, when the poison of decadence and pessimism tasted so sweet, and Baudelaire’s “flowers of evil" were tenderly cultivated in all the fashionable magazines and in the hothouses of literature. Tolstoi’s realistic talent had to make its way through all these tempting fads and find a foothold for itself at a time when realistic traditions appeared to have been elbowed out. Make his way he did, and without abandoning the tenets of classical realism.

p However, Tolstoi’s adoption of the socialist ideology was not a simple or easy conversion for him. To begin with, in 1918 he happened to be in Odessa, on a literary tour, when the town was occupied by the Whites, and when the Red Army advanced on the town. He left the country, and settled down in Paris. He lived as an emigre for four years, and his writings were printed in 100 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1970/SLPP274/20070330/199.tx" anti-Soviet magazines. When he finally returned home in 1923 he was not ready ideologically to immediately set about the business of creating a new art—the art of socialist realism. It took him some time to find his bearings and discover himself anew, so to speak. It is no exaggeration to say that his talent really blossomed only in those first Soviet years, which gave him a deeper understanding of our history and revealed to him in a new way the essence of the Russian people’s life. His most important books, we find, are the work of an historical writer, not so much in their subject matter as in their approach to facts. His talent shed its delicate tracery of stylisation, and the pure gold of his writing emerged in all its glory.

p What do the words “discovered himself anew" really mean? What is the nature of Tolstoi’s talent, and precisely what qualities did it display upon coming in touch with the revolutionary reality? These questions deserve dwelling upon in greater detail for the example of Tolstoi sheds some light on the nature of talent as such, illumining it first of all from the angle of its relation to the age in which it has its being. Today, the theory of “art for art’s sake" is no longer very popular anywhere in the world. But just the same there is a widespread notion in the West that an artist’s talent is a spontaneous force, and that an artist’s world outlook cannot affect the quality of his work. A poet simply expresses his feelings, he moulds or creates his images from the material provided by reality, merely obeying the “divine will" of his genius. He creates his images because he is driven by an inner, aesthetic urge to mould, to imitate, to reproduce one detail or another. All this has filled whole tomes of aesthetic theories. The poet is “indifferent” to his material, and even a vice—if it is described or reproduced with talent—becomes an aesthetic virtue. The business of the artist is merely to stir the reader’s senses, never mind what sort of emotions are aroused.

p This attitude was not entirely renounced even during the Second World War. There were poets in England, for example, who held that poetry should stay out of the war. However, such a deliberate withdrawal from history, sanctifying the poets’ release from all moral obligations at a time when everyone’s moral feeling, outraged by Hitlerism, was high, evoked the protest of English critics. This indifference contained a desire to disclaim any connection with the struggle, to stand aside from it, and consequently, to all intents and purposes, to lend the enemy moral support.

p A highly developed moral sense has always been a feature of Russian literature. Lev Tolstoi is probably the most convincing and compelling proof that a high moral sense can go together with strong, uninhibited writing. And, what is more, that it can be the pivot and the driving power of creativity itself. The whole of Dostoyevsky is a “poem of conscience”, an example of how a writer’s 101 moral sense develops into a force that shapes the plot and the characters. It was this moral sense that prompted the Russian classics to show reality in a critical light. They chose this angle because the reality of tsarist Russia provoked their moral sense, outraged it, and invited revolutionary protest. This was what determined the main trend in the literature of the past—the trend of critical realism, as Chernyshevsky named it.

p Such a critical attitude to Russian life, satirically magnified in the works of Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin, was misinterpreted by some readers, foreign readers mostly, who began to wonder about Russia and the character of the Russian people generally, and to doubt the writers’ loyalty to their country. But this scathing ridicule and indictment of vices, this attention to what was happening in the country, was precisely how Russian literature expressed its patriotism.

p It must be said, however, that even within the movement of critical realism in 19th-century Russian literature we can hear lifeasserting notes, a definite affirmation of hopeful faith in life and in the people. This hosanna to life takes its beginning from Pushkin and, spreading in a thousand rivulets, makes itself heard in the books of many Russian writers of the past. Even Gogol is not all criticism. Suffice it to recall his poetic vision of Russia rushing like a troika through the vastness of history. There is affirmation of Russian life in Turgenev, Herzen, Lev Tolstoi, Chekhov and Gorky. But only in Soviet times, when the chains fettering the creative genius of the people had been smashed, did this lifeasserting melody ring out with full power.

p Mayakovsky entitled his famous poem Fine] and it sounds like a joyous sigh. He says:

p I’ve been all over the world in my time.
Well, life is good,
          and living is fine!

p Both these currents in classical Russian realism are embodied vividly and distinctly in Alexei Tolstoi’s work. He entered the literary scene as a critical realist, continuing the Gorky tradition, by-passing symbolism, decadence and futurism. But in his criticism he goes to the lengths of grotesquerie, like Gogol, in portraying the landed gentry and the intellectuals of old Russia. Some of them, like his travelling magician (Count Cagliostrd), are almost phantasmagoric. In their drunken despair his heroes may wallow in filth and shamelessness, yet afterwards a character like Prince Krasnopolsky (The Lame Prince) will crawl on his knees all the way from the railway station to his country estate to implore his wife to forgive 102 him. The critical light in which Tolstoi shows up his heroes is harsh, relentless and spiteful, and the shadows it casts are ugly.

p But the most important quality of his talent has always been its life-asserting power. Gorky had good reason for calling Tolstoi’s talent “jolly”. Indeed, under his pen everything acquires an elusive optimistic hue, everything is given the hope of a chance. He does not lose faith even in those men who have sunk to the lowest depths of moral depravation.

p This life-loving quality of Tolstoi’s talent finds expression in the most various forms. For instance, he loves to write “playfully” (take his The Golden Book of Love, 1919, and his Wonder of Wonders, 1926) and enjoys a literary joke (the stories Paramour, 1925, An Extraordinary Adventure on Shipboard, 1930, and others). Or take his earlier stories (The Jasper Book, 1909, and others) written in a satirical vein in an elegantly stylised 18th-century manner, the language as pure and transparent as water-colour. This life-loving quality was reflected in the very style of his writing, especially in his short stories. Their plots develop quickly and lightly. There is no morbid psychologism in Tolstoi (such as is typical of Dostoyevsky, for instance), and naturally no wallowing in horrors (as with his contemporary, Leonid Andreyev).

p Tolstoi’s realism and artistic method are rooted in the Pushkin tradition, although in his earlier works, as we have already mentioned, there is also a certain amout of Gogolian grotesqueric. Still, the predominant mood in Tolstoi’s writings has always been goodnatured rather than critical.

p In order to understand what we mean by saying that Tolstoi reached ideological maturity in his Soviet years, let us compare his historical stories written during his emigre days in Paris with those written after his return to Soviet Russia when he had acquired new experience.

p In his story The Day of Peter written in 1918, the great Russian tsar is shown as a gangling young fellow, cruel and erratic, strong in will and in his passions. The “barbarity” of late 17th-century Russia is rendered most pungently, but the vividness of this description left no room for a deeper probing into the historical significance of the age or even Peter’s character. It is interesting that when he returned to the same theme ten years later Tolstoi, by then the richer for new experience drawn from Soviet reality, approached the character of Peter and the problem of humanism not abstractly but historically.

p In the years following the Revolution of 1917, the problem of humanism arising in connection with the relationship between the individual and the state was more or less of common concern to a great many Soviet writers. The question posed by Dostoyevsky— 103 may blood be shed in the name of mankind’s supreme aims?—has been raised in many works of Soviet literature (for instance, Konstantin Fedin’s novel Towns and Years, 1924, the earlier short stories of Leonid Leonov, Mayakovsky’s poems, particularly his 750,000,000). Alexei Tolstoi, who was extremely sensitive to the changing spirit of the times, also introduced this theme in his writings. However, he handled it more in the tradition of Dostoyevsky, with a bias in favour of man, but man as an abstract concept, as the centre of the universe and not as a member of that living organisma historically developing people. Tolstoi poses the problem of humanism in his historical plays of that period The Death of Danton and The Golden Book of Love, but he resolves it in an abstract manner, as a conflict between the eternal categories of good and evil. The same is the case in his story Charity\ (1918), the exclamation mark making the title sound like an unconditional demand.

p When he returns to the problem of humanism in the relationship between the individual and the state in his later works, the trilogy The Ordeal, the tragedy Ivan the Terrible and the novel Peter the First, he shifts his accents.

p If I dwell on the novel Peter the First in somewhat greater detail, it is because in my opinion Peter the First and Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don are the peaks of Soviet fiction, unchallenged by anything else written in all the fifty years since the 1917 Revolution. Peter the First, which Tolstoi himself considered his masterpiece, renders the language, the characters, the details of life, and the whole scene of late 17th-century Russia with such inspired accuracy and insight that he might well be writing about things he had seen with his own eyes.

p The theme of Peter the Great intrigued many Russian writers because it embodied both the cardinal problem and the age-old drama of the Russian people. Peter, whose face was “terrible to see" as Pushkin wrote in Poltava, was both the “terror” that set upon Russia’s backwardness, and the “hope” for the way out of this backwardness. Debates raged continually round the subject of Peter’s personality, and Peter himself was time and again used as a figurehead by those sections of Russian society (such as the “Westernisers”) which stood for progress and Russia’s inclusion in the group of European powers. Lev Tolstoi also studied the reign of Peter the Great and wanted to write a novel about him. But he never got beyond the first few chapters. His anti-state, anarchic views prevented him from really feeling the poetry of Peter’s ambitious plans for the transformation of the country.

p As I see it, it was precisely Alexei Tolstoi’s constant interest in state matters, which was naturally heightened by the spectacle of the Russian people building up their new Soviet statehood, that 104 prompted him to take up the theme of Peter the Great. He later wrote: “I suppose it was more by instinct than consciously that in this theme I tried to find the key to the Russian people and Russian statehood.” And again: “In order to understand the secret of the Russian people, and its greatness, one must study its past thoroughly: our history, its main turning-points, and its tragic and creative epochs in which the Russian character was shaped.” (Autobiography).

p There are, of course, no direct parallels in the epoch of Peter the Great and the Soviet epoch, and Tolstoi did right to tell his readers not to look for any sort of hints or resemblances in his novel. But there is no doubt that through Peter and his reforms Tolstoi wanted to arrive at greater understanding of the dramatic and creative epoch of Russia’s transformation into a socialist state.

p It is the end of the I7th century. Russia—huge, dark and barbarous. Deserted roads. Wretchedly poor villages, with smoke pouring from the doors of the squat chimneyless huts. . . .

p The opening scene of the novel is set in a hut like that belonging to Ivan Brovkin, a manor serf of the nobleman Volkov. The plot develops up the social ladder, so to speak. There is Alyoshka, Brovkin’s son, who finds himself first in the household of gentlefolk and then in Moscow as an army recruit. The circle widens more and more, and there before us is the palace, the Kremlin, the boyars, and then the noblest boyar of all—Princess Sofia’s perfumed “gallant”, Vasily Golitsin, who has been educated in Europe. Peter is only a boy. He reigns together with his brother Ivan, while his sister Sofia rules the country.

p Tolstoi takes us from the chimneyless huts to the throne room where foreign ambassadors are received, and to the council hall where the boyars sweat in their heavy, fur-lined velvet coats; then into the patriarch’s prayer room, from there to the royal apartments teeming with monks, wet nurses, and clowns; and thence to the German settlement in Moscow. Little by little he unfolds before us a panorama of Russia with all her startling contrasts and ruthless internal strife. There are the merchants’ daughters learning “politesse” and “outlandish” European dances by order of the tsar; the friend of the young tsar General Lefort, easy-going and gay, elegantly dressed in a coat of pink velvet and a golden wig; the socials and the assemblies, the court theatre, the Dutch seamen, the builders of the future St. Petersburg, the self-taught painters, the fugitive serfs, and the convicts working in the shipyards and the cannon factories.

p Gradually, the figure of young Peter emerges as the central character of the narrative. He is gathering together a group of his closest associates from among common folk and noblemen who are in sympathy with his plans. On the one hand, there is the indolent, 105 sleepy existence of the courtiers ruled by Peter’s mother Natalya Kirillovna and Patriarch Joachim, and on the other—Peter’s impressions from his encounters with people from the West, merchants and seamen arriving in Russia. He hates the boyars’ traditional way of life, and this hatred makes him feel painfully and acutely aware of Russia’s musty, sluggish backwoods existence. “Russia lies there as sleepy, destitute and clumsy as ever,” Peter exclaims. “Talk of shame, indeed! It’s the rich and the strong who have shame. And here I don’t know how to shake the people awake, how to make them open their eyes. . . . Are you men, or have you shed so many tears and so much blood in a thousand years, despairing of truth and happiness, that you have rotted like that tree, drooping down to the moss?. . .”

p And “I felt as if claws were dug into my heart—I was so tortured by remorse, by anger at our own people, at the Russians, and by envy for the smug merchants who’d unfurl their great sails and start for home, for their wondrous lands. And you—back you go to the Wretchedness of Moscow. Maybe I should issue some frightening order or something?”

p But when one of the foreigners tries to adopt a superior tone in speaking of Russia, Peter feels that his national pride and his human dignity have been wounded.

p The character of this “carpenter-tsar”, this tireless crowned toiler, one of the most remarkable men in history, who managed to heave Russia up out of the rut and Europeanise her is revealed from every angle, psychological and historical. This is no romantic barbarian, no petty tyrant obsessed with the idea of enlightenment as he had hitherto been portrayed (by Alexei Tolstoi himself).

p While sacrificing none of the historically authentic details, none of the picturesqueness of the wild and violent nature of this man from the Russian Middle Ages, Tolstoi shows the greatness of Peter’s creative personality, as a statesman and patriot. All that was really progressive in Russia naturally rallied to Peter. They were people of different estates—boyars, merchants, commoners, and peasants.

p One of the most successful characters is Menshikov, who began his career as Peter’s batman and rose to commander of the army and the first noble of the land—a reckless, thievish, gifted and insanely brave man.

p Another remarkable figure is Ivan Brovkin, a former serf who becomes the tsar’s assistant in procuring provisions for the army.

p In this novel Tolstoi’s pen is full of colours, it sparkles with the brilliance of his characterisations and descriptions, immensely varied and always apt whether he is writing about Peter’s amorous adventures in Moscow’s German settlement, about his foreign travels, amusements at court, or battles. But the best thing in the novel is Russia herself, Russia building and praying, groaning and weeping, 106 forging weapons and building ships, singing and swearing, destitute and contradictory. Russia giving birth in intense travail to a new energetic Russia, with a fantastic effort bringing it forth from the depths of her immobile Byzantine past so that she might unfurl her sails and travel over all the seas and oceans of the world along with the ships of the other leading powers.

p Peter the First invites one to reflect on many things, and most of all on the nature of the Russian.

p Tolstoi’s other major novel was his trilogy The Ordeal, on which he worked for twenty years, finishing it on June 22, 1941, the day nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. In it Tolstoi expressed his thoughts and reflections about the Russian land and the destinies of the Russians during the first thirty years of this century. The book gives a panoramic picture of the Civil War, but it is at the same time a chronicle of events, a historical novel, and an intimate diary all rolled into one. Russia looms so big, so very big in this novel. The story moves from towns to villages; we see the seething life of the country about to flow over like a river at flood-time; we watch the battle of passions developing; we hear the roar of guns and voices raised in frenzied debate. We see people from different walks of life: aristocrats, peasants, intellectuals, lawyers, doctors, soldiers and workers. We see them in drawing rooms, in trenches and dug-outs, in military hospitals, in factory workshops, and in the field where the land must be ploughed. Everything in this book is infused with the author’s anguished love for Russia, distressing in her very vastness and her contrasts, yet dauntlessly striding forward and calling men to follow her.

p In The Ordeal the female characters are the best, especially the two sisters, Katya and Dasha. All of Tolstoi’s heroines seem to be bathed in Turgenev’s gentle glow and emanate grace and moral loveliness.

p The idea of the novel is to trace the arduous road that had to be traversed before the new Soviet statehood was finally established. The author had good reason to devote so much space to anarchism. The conclusion he draws is that unruliness, to which human nature tends, if given free rein, will inevitably lead to fascism.

p Telegin says to Katya: “Remember how much we talked, how boringly senseless we thought the rotation of history, the fall of great civilisations, ideas reduced to sorry parodies. . . . Under the starched shirt front there’s the same hairy chest of a Pithecanthropus. . . . Lies! The veil has been torn from our eyes. All our past life is nothing but crime and lies! Russia gave birth to a man. . . . And this man demanded that people should have the right to be people. It is not a dream, it’s an idea, it’s borne on the ends of our bayonets, it’s realisable. A blinding light has illumined 107 the half-ruined vaults of all the past millennia. Everything is in order. Everything is logical. The aim has been found. And it’s known to every Red Army soldier.”

p The poetry of the great aim—to give men the right to freedom and human dignity—the poetry of humanism, permeates the whole trilogy which describes the ordeal of the Russian people in the name of this cause.

p Since the purpose of my book is to give readers a general idea of Soviet literature I cannot, of course, review all of Tolstoi’s work which fills ten large volumes. Still, there is something I particularly want to draw attention to.

p Tolstoi’s The Viper is one of the best Civil War stories in the Soviet literature of the nineteen-twenties. The author liked this story very much himself, and invariably included it in his collections. The Viper was what the tenants of a packed communal flat called Olga Zotova, an unsociable, solitary woman made up entirely of sharp angles. When she was a girl of seventeen her parents— well-to-do people of the merchant class in Kazan—were murdered by bandits who had then set the house on fire. Olga barely escaped with her life. “The film of ice on which she once dreamed of building her fortune: marriage, love, family, a solid, happy home, turned out to be so appallingly thin. This thin ice concealed an abyss. It cracked, and life, raw and passionate, swept over her with its turbid waters. . . . She accepted it as such: life was a fierce struggle (they tried to kill her twice and failed). . . a crust of bread for today and the mad excitement of yet untasted love.” Yemelyanov, a Red Army officer, takes her into his cavalry unit. Their love is as brief as a flash of lightning, scorching her with its pure flame. Yemelyanov is killed, and Olga begins life anew for the third time. She is expected to adapt herself to the life of an ordinary Soviet typist, ruled by office hours and crushed by routine. Seemingly trifling things pile up, compounded of pettyness, kitchen gossip, meanness, until unable to take any more Olga, “the viper" discharges her revolver into the face of the apparently harmless Lyalechka. What is that woman they call “a bitch with a cocked revolver"—a victim of the war, or a child of the Revolution?

p In Tolstoi’s earlier works (especially in his cycle In Volga Country) women play a large role. His women, like Sasha and Katya in The Lame Prince, personify goodness, and their hearts are big, generous and warm. In a woman like that a man finds a haven of solace. Tolstoi believed that this all-forgiving gentleness in women was one of the main features of the Russian national character. Dostoyevsky also believed that it was in his Tatyana (from Eugene Onegin) that Pushkin “giving the glorified ideal of the Russian woman" created the positive type of a Russian. Alexei Tolstoi’s female 108 characters can really be traced back to Pushkin’s poetic prototypes. They must have the right to love, to lavish the generosity of their hearts. That is the tragedy of Olga Zotova in The Viper. Life dashed her to the ground when she was only a girl, broke her, and gave her no chance to express what was in her heart. But for all that she is a wonderfully strong, forthright person, a soldier of the new world who hates the shabby world of the Philistines.

p Metallic notes come into Tolstoi’s voice beginning with The Viper and he begins to poetise strong characters. There is another interesting point in Tolstoi’s artistic development: whereas before, in his earliest period, he embodied goodness in his female characters, in his later work the Russian national character is personified by men who perform feats of statesmanship and themselves make history. The idea of humanism becomes more profound and acquires an historical meaning.

p Alexei Tolstoi devoted the latter part of his life mainly to work on large novels and series of novels. Yet our knowledge and understanding of him will not be complete if we ignore his political articles and essays. It can be said of Tolstoi that he was perfectly at home in the Russian language, and revelled in its beauty. But he could also use it as a weapon. And that is what he did during the war with Hitler’s Germany. His voice resounded “like a tocsin in an hour of calamity or popular festivity”, to quote Lermontov. He expressed his fury, his pride, his sense of outraged dignity, and his boundless admiration of the people in words that flew like redhot sparks from under his pen, scorching readers and radio listeners. In those years his passionate desire to really fathom the Russian people, its history and the sources of its strength was fanned into a burning obsession. This is how he qualified Russian patriotism in 1942:

p “Only a revolutionary socialist plan could venture to raise Russia to the economic level of advanced civilisation; only science could accomplish what twenty years later was called a miracle by foreign observers. Only socialist revolution could save Soviet Russia from that wretchedness to which fascism reduced Europe. Russia was saved by the great socialist plan. It is based on the humane principle of encouraging the national development of the numerous peoples and tribes inhabiting the country and of lending this development extensive material and cultural assistance. The socialist plan envisaged our country as a single, complex organism, as a large collective Man, whose every part and member—separate individuals too—must develop freely and exist simultaneously as a part of the whole and as an integral whole.” (From the article “Indestructible Fortress".)

p I am by no means an apologist of everything ever written by 109 Alexei Tolstoi. He also has his weak points, his trivial writings, especially among his plays, such as the one about the last Russian Empress and Rasputin. All this must be put down to “literary overheads”, so to speak. Every writer, even Lev Tolstoi, has his poorer works. But Alexei Tolstoi, to my mind, however strictly one judges his works, is a genuine adornment of Soviet literature in its entirety. Just as one cannot know or understand old Russia without reading Lev Tolstoi, one cannot understand the new Soviet Russia nor the course of Soviet literature’s development without reading Alexei Tolstoi.

He has recorded everything—the contradictions of history, the pain, the drama, the greatness, the strength—all that fermented and seethed in the country during the decisive phase of its history.