The life of Alexei Tolstoy was primarily 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 Stalinist Russia, Tolstoy was an actor who played not one, but many roles: a symbolist poet, a realist writer, a fierce anti-Soviet, a national Bolshevik, a patriot, a cosmopolitan, an egoist, a caring husband, a hedonist and an epicurean who is in love with life and hates death.