Alexandra Leontevna Bostrom was a Russian essayist, prose and play writer.
Background
Alexandra Leontevna Bostrom was born on November 13 (25), 1854 in the village of Korovino in the Samara province (now Korovino, Ulyanovsk Oblast, Russian Federation). She came from an impoverished noble family. Also, Alexandra was a distant relative of the Decembrist N. Turgenev.
Education
Alexandra Leontyevna was educated at Samara girls' gymnasium.
Career
Alexandra Leontyevna wrote her first story in 1870. In Freedom, she talked about the life of servants in a manor house. In the 1890s, she began to collaborate with Samara periodicals. Her printed debut was the moral-descriptive novel Neugomonnoye serdtse, published in 1822, which provoked a critical response.
In 1886, Alexandra Leontyevna wrote the second novel Zakholust'ye, which, thanks to Bostrom's acquaintance with the Narodniks ideas, was more vitally reliable. In the late 1880s and early 1900s, she wrote a lot of newspaper essays from peasant life, telling about the need and lawlessness of the Volga villages: Lagutka (1889), Vyborshchiki (1890), Maria Rufimovna. Critics responded mostly positively to Bostrom's works, admitting that she compensated for the lack of talent with detailed descriptions.
Alexandra Leontyevna got her fame from works for children. Her short informative stories, usually illustrated, became beloved by many generations of kids. Her collection Podruga, published in 1892, was awarded an honorary review at the Belgian World's Fair. The book Kak Yura znakomitsya s zhizn'yu zhivotnykh (1907) was considered a model of scientific popularization for children. Of the more than 10 written plays of Alexandra, only the one-act children's extravaganza Son na lugu (1904) was published, and the play Snegurochka was staged on the Chistyakov's Saint Petersburg Children's Theater in the early 1900s.
Connections
In 1873, at the age of 19, Alexandra Leontyevna married the landowner-tyrant Count N.A. Tolstoy. Their marriage lasted 8 years, and leaving their three children and being pregnant with the fourth, she left her husband for a nobleman, A.A. Bostrom. The act of Alexandra and the subsequent circumstances of this family drama aroused the sympathetic attention of the Russian democratic public. By the decision of the Synod, Alexandra Leontyevna was not allowed to marry again, so officially she wasn't the wife of Bostrom.