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Count Nikolai Tolstoy
Count Nikolai Tolstoy is a Russian–British historian and writer. He is a former parliamentary candidate for the UK Independence Party and is the current nominal head of the House of Tolstoy, a Russian noble family.
Early Life
Born in London, Tolstoy is of part Russian descent. The son of Count Dimitri Tolstoy and Mary Wicksteed, he is a member of the noble Tolstoy family. He grew up as the stepson of the novelist Patrick O'Brian, whom his mother married after his parents divorced.
On his upbringing he has written:
"Like thousands of Russians in the present century, I was born and brought up in another country and was only able to enter the land of my ancestors as a visitor in later years. It was nevertheless a very Russian upbringing, one which impressed on me the unusual nature of my inheritance. I was baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church and I worshipped in it. I prayed at night the familiar words Oche nash, attended parties where little Russian boys and girls spoke a mixture of languages, and felt myself by manner and temperament to be different than my English friends. I think I was the most affected by those melancholy and evocative Russian homes where my elders, for the most part people of great charm and eccentricity, lived surrounded by the relics – ikons, Easter eggs, portraits of Tsar and Tsaritsa, family photographs, and émigré newspapers – of that mysterious, far-off land of wolves, boyars, and snow-forests of Ivan Bilibin's famous illustrations to Russian fairy-tales. Somewhere there was a real Russian land to which we all belonged, but it was shut away over distant seas and space of years."
Tolstoy holds dual British and Russian citizenship. He was educated at Wellington College, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and Trinity College Dublin.
Literary Career
Tolstoy has written a number of books about Celtic mythology. In The Quest for Merlin he has explored the character of Merlin, and his Arthurian novel The Coming of the King builds on his research into ancient British history and Welsh mythology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979.
He has also written about the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. In 1977 he wrote Victims of Yalta, which criticised Operation Keelhaul, the forced handover of Axis collaborators from the Soviet Union to the Soviets by the Allies. In 1986 he wrote The Minister and the Massacres, which examined the British Bleiburg repatriations to Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav government. It received much critical praise, as well as some criticism by Macmillan's authorised biography.