Alexander and Mstislav Tolstoy: attempt at biographies

Abstract: The article attempts to reconstruct the biographies of two prominent historical figures of the first decades of the XX century – Counts Alexander and Mstislav Tolstoy, older brothers of the writer A.N. Tolstoy. Having begun their career path in Samara and in the Samara province, where both alternately headed the Samara district nobility, they made excellent careers (one of the brothers met the 1917 revolution as governor of Vilna, and the other as vice-governor of St. Petersburg), many and productive worked for the benefit of their hometown of Samara and the country as a whole, but after the revolution they were forgotten and erased from Russian history, a slow return to which began about three decades ago, but has not yet fully taken place. This article is an attempt at such a personal return, where, on the basis of rare and unique documents from the family collections of the descendants of Count Tolstoy, memoirs, newspaper publications, etc., their biographies are restored, including both official, public, and personal, family moments. The attempted biographical reconstruction is interesting and significant both in historical and local history terms, and in historical and literary terms – as a context for the historical trilogy of the younger brother of the heroes of this article by A.N. Tolstoy – the trilogy «The Road to Calvary».