Aleksey's duties were not many: he had to visit the Crown Prince in Saint Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo, take walks with him on Yelagin Island and participate in games, many of which were, in effect, small scale military exercises.

"Back in Russia I fell into a deep nostalgic depression, longing for Italy which felt like a real motherland; desperately mourning the loss, I cried at night when my dreams carried me off to this Paradise lost," he wrote in his autobiography decades later.

The assignment was rather formal; it did not demand Tolstoy's presence in Germany and he spent most of his time in Saint Petersburg, leading a merry life, spending up to three thousand rubles per month,[5] often traveling to Italy and France.

[3] In late 1840 Tolstoy was transferred back to Russia to a position in the Tsar's Imperial State Chancellery 2nd Department where he continued to work for many years, slowly rising in the hierarchy.

Complicated in structure, multi-layered and rich in counterpoints, featuring both the element of "horror" and political satire, it instantly caught the attention of Vissarion Belinsky who praised its "obviously still very young, but undoubtedly gifted author," totally unaware of the latter's real identity.

[13] It took another two years for him to see his second short story, "Artyomy Semyonovich Bervenkovsky", a homage to the so-called 'natural school' apparently written under the influence of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls,[14] published in the 1st volume of Count Vladimir Sollogub's Yesterday and Today almanac.

[2] Belinsky responded negatively to this publication, describing the piece as "rather dull", and an "unfortunate manifestation of mental irritation picked from Chateaubriand" (meaning apparently Les Martyrs, 1809).

He was described as "a handsome young man with blonde hair and a freshly coloured face" and was renowned for his physical strength, "bending spoons, forks and horse-shoes and driving nails into walls with one finger.

[13] In the early 1850s, in collaboration with the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, Tolstoy created the fictional writer Kozma Prutkov, a petty bureaucrat with great self-esteem who parodied the poetry of the day and soon became famous for his utterly banal aphorisms.

This spectacular farce (featuring at one point a dozen small dogs running about on stage) caused a huge scandal, was promptly banned by Nikolay I (who was among the audience) and remained unpublished until 1884.

[2] It was also in 1851 that Tolstoy first met Sophia Andreyevna Miller (1827?–1892), the wife of a cavalry colonel (whom she later divorced with great difficulty) and an impressively well-educated woman who knew fourteen languages, at a Bolshoy Theater masquerade.

[3] Many of his poems ("My dear bluebells", "Amidst the ball uproar", "Brighter than the skylark's singing", "The wind from high up, it is not...") have been set to music by renowned composers and have become famous Russian romances.

[17] In 1854 Sovremennik magazine published several of Tolstoy's verses ("My bluebells", "Oh you haystacks..." and others), which instantly got critics talking, and also the first of Kozma Prutkov's humorously pompous poetic exercises.

[5] On 2 September the allies landed at Yevpatoria and Tolstoy headed South, to join the Imperial infantry regiment (under the command of Lev Perovsky, another of his uncles) as an army major, in March 1855.

"[6]Tolstoy caused much controversy with his scathing remarks aimed at contemporary government officials (Alexander Timashev, Vladimir Butkov, Ivan Veillot) whom he – a supporter of the monarch – considered real enemies of the State.

[21] Being neither a westernizer nor a slavophile, Tolstoy annoyed both parties by his infatuation with pre-Tatar Russian society which he idealized whole-heartedly, seeing it as an Eastern strain of European knighthood, based on the cult of the nobleman.

"Tolstoy represented a rare type of man who not only evaded by every possible means the favours and laurels that came his way, but had to go through painfully tedious battles with people who, driven by the best of intentions, were imposing every opportunity of making a brilliant career on him," wrote literary historian and BEED biographer Semyon Vengerov in 1903.

His poetic drama Don Juan, published the same year, was less successful: even if not officially banned, it wasn't staged in its author's lifetime and made its theatrical debut only in 1905, severely cut by censors.

Both Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev expressed their delight at this personal swipe at the Interior Minister Pyotr Valuyev, and a mockery in general of a conservative bureaucrat trying to come across as a liberal.

[24] Tolstoy was lenient land-owner, admired by his Krasny Rog peasants who were permitted to use his fields as common pastures and given free timber and primary education for their children in a school he built for them in 1859.

[29] Another unusual feature of Tolstoy's poems was the fact that, while rather salon-like and graceful both in nature and form, they were full of 'simplistic' bits borrowed freely from common talk and traditional Russian folklore.

More than half of Tolstoy's poems have been put to music by leading Russian composers like Tchaykovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Musorgsky, Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Anton Rubinstein, Sergey Rakhmaninov and others.

Critics argued that (unlike, say, Nekrasov) Tolstoy used folklorisms as a mere stylistic instrument, using stories from the history of the Russian Middle Ages as a means to convey his own ideas and theories (Zmei Tugarin), and to link historical utopias with relevant social comment (Boryvoi, Vasily Shibanov).

Likewise, the fearsome Ilya Muromets who came across as a rather violent, dangerous and often sacrilegious type in folk bylinas, was portrayed by Tolstoy as a "benign grandfather figure," rather gracious and well-spoken.

The Dream of Councillor Popov and History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev, his best known satires, were spread across Russia in manuscript, gaining huge popularity amongst all social strata.

[35] Shchedrin, describing the current state of Russian literature as a "kingdom of scoundrels", in a letter to Aleksey Zhemchuzhnikov wrote: "Add to all this the fun-and-games-seeking 'free artists' like Count A. K. Tolstoy who makes... our obscurantists' hearts beat faster with delight.

On the other hand, Ivan Grozny and the oprichnina horrors were depicted with great vividness and passion; the novel's masterfully built structure, its rich musical language made it a perfect Walter Scott-type of book for adolescents, according to Vengerov.

They impress us with intelligence and insight rather than with flights of imagination, but in Tsar Fyodor Tolstoy managed to create one of the most interesting characters in Russian literature: that of a kind and weak ruler who has a keen sense of justice but is unable to make his evil aids implement his good will.

It was the generic closeness of Tolstoy's plays to the Russia of old, Annenkov argued, that made them historic in the truest sense of the word, for "their significance as living testimony to the spirit those people and their times is beyond doubt".

Vladimir Korolenko called Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich "a gem of Russian drama," that's been shining especially bright next to "the totally dismal theater repertoire of the late 19th century".