The Red Jester

13 hrs. 49 min.

Language Russian

Author Alexey Varlamov

Narrator Larisa Tretyakova

Description

Aleksei Tolstoy’s life was, above all, a novel. A novel with literature, with emigration, with power—and, of course, a novel with women. An aristocrat by blood, an aristocrat by life, who remained a count in Stalin’s Russia, Tolstoy was an actor who played not one, but many roles: a symbolist poet, a realist writer, a furious anti-Soviet, a national Bolshevik, a patriot, a cosmopolitan, an egoist, a caring husband, a hedonist and an Epicurean, in love with life and hating death. His destiny had ups and downs, literary scandals, slaps, forgeries, duels, conspiracies, and revelations—freedom and servility, generosity and greed, hospitality and arrogance, immorality and magnanimity intertwined in it all. But above all, Tolstoy was a hard worker, and in Russian literature two of his novels, a childhood tale, and a fairy tale that people will read forever, will remain.
Writer and literary historian Aleksei Varlamov—author of life stories of Mikhail Prishvin and Alexander Grin—creates, in his biographical narrative, an astonishing portrait of this vast man against the backdrop of a fantastic era in which “the third Tolstoy” was destined to live.