[Literature & Art] [Tolstoy, Leo. (1828–1910)] Tolstoy, Alexandra. (1884–1979). Two Original Photographs, Signed. A pair of original photographs of Leo Tolstoy, one showing him together with his daughter Alexandra, as he reads from a manuscript to her, shown seated at a typewriter. The second image is of the writer seated on a veranda with an unidentified older woman. Each photograph has been signed on the verso in purple pencil "A Tolstoy / 30 July / 1931."



Alexandra (Sasha) Lvovna Tolstaya was the youngest daughter and secretary of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Although she shared with her father the doctrine of non-violence, she was involved in the events of World War I and was awarded three St George Medals and the rank of colonel. The Bolsheviks imprisoned her in 1920, but she was installed as the director of the Tolstoy museum in Yasnaya Polyana the next year. She left Soviet Union in 1929, and settled in the United States, where she founded the Tolstoy Foundation. In later years, she helped many Russian intellectuals (notably Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Rachmaninoff) to escape Bolshevik persecution and to settle in America.