Tolstoy Matriarch Dies at Age 95

WASHINGTON -- Countess Vera Tolstoy, the granddaughter of famed Russian author Leo Tolstoy and a former Russian-language broadcast officer for Voice of America in Washington, has died. She was 95.


She died Monday at home in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, of complications related to injuries suffered in an auto accident in November.


Countess Tolstoy was one of the last surviving grandchildren of Count Tolstoy, the author of such classics as "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina," and she was the last of the Tolstoy descendants to have a personal memory of life on the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana when her grandfather was still alive. As a child, she often sat on his lap and played with his beard while he told her stories, and she sang children's songs to him.


She was born in Dubrovska in western Russia and was 7 when Leo Tolstoy died in 1910. In 1920, she fled her homeland in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. She did not return to Yasnaya Polyana, 250 kilometers south of Moscow, until 1991, when three generations of Tolstoy descendants gathered for a family reunion at the estate where Russia's greatest writer spent much of his adult life.


During the intervening seven decades, she spent 20 years in Washington working with the Russian broadcasting section of Voice of America, where she specialized in news broadcasts and feature stories for listeners in the Soviet Union. She retired in 1974 and moved to Florida.


For much of the 1920s she lived in Yugoslavia. In 1923, she married a man named Vladimir Bakovsky, but the marriage was annulled. They had a son, Sergei Tolstoy.


In the 1930s, she lived in Prague. As she traveled across Europe, she acquired various languages and customs. She sang Gypsy ballads in nightclubs, directed the Barbara Gould Salons in Paris and, after World War II, sang for the USO in Germany and the Netherlands.


She came to the United States in the 1950s at the invitation of her aunt Alexandra Lvovna Tolstoy, the youngest daughter of Leo Tolstoy and the founder of the Tolstoy Foundation. She sold perfume in New York for Elizabeth Arden before coming to Washington with Voice of America.


Returning to Russia for the 1991 family reunion at Yasnaya Polyana, Countess Vera Tolstoy was the unofficial matriarch of Leo Tolstoy's 187 direct descendants. Only one of her grandfather's 13 children had remained in Russia; the others had scattered over four continents after the Russian Revolution.


"If we stayed here, we would have been killed," Countess Tolstoy said.


On returning to the Tolstoy estate, Countess Tolstoy immediately noticed an alabaster monument to Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, and she was offended. "That statue should be taken away," she declared. "He was against everything my grandfather stood for. Lenin believed in using force and terror to achieve his ends. He is responsible for Russia's present disaster. Tolstoy thought that force was impermissible under any circumstances, even in the name of creating a better society."


During her years in America, people often mispronounced her last name or asked her how to spell it. Someone once called her "Trotsky," the surname of one of the prime architects of the Bolshevik Revolution. "No, not that, anything but that," she said with a shudder.


But in Russia in 1991, the Tolstoys once again were treated like aristocrats. Countess Tolstoy was given a private audience with Patriarch Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.


"We have been overwhelmed by the attention," she said at the time. "The reverence of ordinary Russians for anything to do with Tolstoy is incredible. Anything my grandfather ever touched, anything he ever used, is regarded as a museum piece."


Masha Gessen's column will not appear this week.