The life of Alexei Tolstoy was first and foremost a novel. A romance with literature, with emigration, with power and, of course, a romance with women. An aristocrat by blood, an aristocrat by life, who remained a count in Stalinist Russia, Tolstoy was an actor who played not one, but many roles: a symbolist poet, a realist writer, a fierce anti-Soviet, a national Bolshevik, a patriot, a cosmopolitan, an egoist, a caring husband. , a hedonist and epicurean, in love with life and hating death. In his life there were ups and downs, literary scandals, slaps, forgeries, duels, conspiracies and revelations; freedom and servility, generosity and greed, hospitality and arrogance, immorality and generosity were intertwined in it. But most of all, Tolstoy was a hard worker, and two of his novels will remain in Russian literature, a story about childhood and a fairy tale that will always be read. Writer and literary historian Alexei Varlamov, author of the biographies of Mikhail Prishvin and Alexander Green, creates an amazing image of this in his biographical narrative an immense man against the background of a fantastic era in which the “third Tolstoy” had to live.[Adapted for AlReader]