Fyokla Tolstaya

Fyokla Tolstaya
Tolstaya in 2018
Born	Anna Nikitichna Tolstaya (1971-02-27) 27 February 1971 (age 53) Moscow, Russia
Occupations	Journalist radio television presenter

Fyokla Nikitichna Tolstaya (‹See Tfd›Russian: Фёкла Никитична Толстая; born 27 February 1971), also known as Fekla Tolstoy, is a Russian journalist, cultural figure, and TV and radio presenter. She is the great-great-granddaughter of the author Leo Tolstoy.^[1]

Fyokla Tolstaya was born Anna Nikitichna Tolstaya on 27 February 1971 in Moscow. She holds a degree in Slavic philology from the Moscow State University and trained as a director at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS).^[2]

She began a career in journalism in the late 1990s, working as a magazine critic, newspaper columnist, and host on the radio stations Echo of Moscow and Radio Mayak.^[3]

Tolstaya was the host of several popular Russian television programmes, including People's Artist, based on the British reality television series Pop Idol. She is the longtime host of a morning talk show called "The Observer" on Russia's main dedicated culture channel (TV Kultura).^[4]

She hosted the Russian documentary series "Great Dynasties" (2005–2006) and was the author and host of a documentary series called "The Tolstoys" about the history of the Tolstoy family (2011).^[5] In 2022, she authored and hosted a documentary series called "Museums Without Borders" that explores contemporary museum practices in different regions of Russia.^[6]

Tolstaya also appeared as an actress in the films Seraphim Polubes and Other Inhabitants of the Earth [ru] (1984), The Old Alphabet (1987) and To Be Victor Pelevin. Sorry, Who? (2020).^[7]

In 2008, she was a finalist in the Russian figure skating competition Stars on Ice [ru], where she performed alongside Olympic medal-winning skater Artur Dmitriev.^[8]

Tolstaya has been head of development at the Leo Tolstoy State Museum in Moscow since 2012.^[9] She led several projects in the digitisation of culture, including a crowdsourcing project called "All of Tolstoy in One Click" to digitise Tolstoy's entire body of work – spanning novels, diaries, letters, childhood memories, and religious and philosophical tracts – and make it fully available online.^[10][11] The free website launched in 2013.^[12] Tolstaya also worked with Samsung to create a mobile app called "Live Pages" that presents classical literary texts in an interactive online format.^[13]

Tolstaya has coordinated several large-scale online reading marathons dedicated to Tolstoy and other authors of classical literature. In 2014 she organised a 36-hour reading marathon of Anna Karenina in partnership with Google. The live broadcast, which streamed on Google+ and YouTube, went viral and entered the Guinness World Records as the largest audience for a live-streamed reading marathon.^[14][15][16]

In 2015, Tolstaya organised an online public reading marathon of War and Peace.^[17] The four-day event had more than 1,300 participants, including Polish film director Andrzej Wajda and a Russian cosmonaut who contributed a reading from the International Space Station.^[18]

Tolstaya is active in the field of digital humanities and co-authored a project called Textograf, a web-based app for the digitisation of manuscripts, among other projects.^[19]