grafinia A. A. (Aleksandra Andreevna) Tolstaia

Born in Moscow in 1817, Countess Aleksandra Andreevna Tolstaya served at the Russian imperial court as a maid of honour and later helped educate royal children. She spent much of her life in the world of the court, but she is especially remembered for her long connection to Leo Tolstoy, to whom she was both a relative and a longtime confidante.

Their correspondence and her later recollections make her valuable to readers interested in Tolstoy not just as a great novelist, but as a person. Her memoir about him, published in German as Erinnerungen an Leo N. Tolstoi, is noted for its intimate, observant tone and for the way it preserves family memories and impressions from someone who knew him well.

She died in Saint Petersburg in 1904. Today, her name endures mainly through those memoirs and through her place in the wider Tolstoy family story, where she offers a thoughtful, firsthand glimpse into nineteenth-century Russian literary and court life.