Tolstoy son. The story of Lev Lvovich Tolstoy. Hellman B.

“My fate is special and I am special,” wrote Lev Lvovich Tolstoy in 1915 in a letter to his mother. The son of a great writer, he desperately sought to find his own voice, but did not succeed in this: during his lifetime, Lev Lvovich-a writer, playwright, sculptor, journalist-could count on an interest in himself primarily as a fat Jr. His own projects remained unrealized, the marriage with the Swedish Dora Westerlund crashed, and the 1917 revolution forever separated him with Russia.

In his book, Ben Hellman reconstructs the complex and dramatic biography of Lviv Lvovich, which was present and coexisted with admiration for the West and Great Russian chauvinism, revolution and war, periods of abundance and extreme needs, years of optimism and despair. The material for the author was many sources, including the correspondence of the fat-Jr. with the father, the autobiography “Experience of my life”, unpublished manuscript of Pavel Tolstoy “The Life of Mom Dora Tolstoy”, partly based on the letters of Dora Westerlund to Sweden.

Ben Hellman-Associate Professor-Emeritus of the University of Helsinki, author of the books “Fairy Tale and Stale. History of Russian children's literature ”(2016) and“ Northern guests of Leo Tolstoy ”(2021), published in the Publishing House“ UFO ”.