Documentary project · in development

Jean Tolstoy

Иван Львович Толстой

An immense name.
A life erased.

Grandson of Leo Tolstoy. Locked up in a penal colony for children at thirteen. He crossed West Africa at thirty-three. He died at thirty-four.

Follow his trail

His journey

1921 – 1955,
thirty-four years.

Only the broad outline here, just enough to set the scene.

  1. Childhood portrait of Jean Tolstoy

    01 1921 – 1934 Biarritz, then Nice

    The name, and nothing else

    Abandoned by his parents, raised by his grandmother — until he turned thirteen. Placed by the French child welfare service with a Mme Chapon, in Nice, he ran away almost at once.

  2. Old postcard of the Mettray penal colony

    02 1936 Mettray colony

    A penal colony for children

    One theft is enough. They send him to Mettray, a penal colony for minors. He is thirteen.

  3. Jean Tolstoy at sixteen

    03 1937 The French Riviera

    Stealing to eat

    Placed in care again on his release, he escapes. On the road he steals — to eat, he would say. In the end they catch him.

  4. Period advertisement for the École centrale de T.S.F., 1937

    04 1938 Paris

    The second chance

    At the trial, a man of the Russian diaspora stands surety for him: Michel Fedoroff. Jean enrols at the École centrale de T.S.F., the national wireless school.

  5. Radio operator in uniform, period illustration

    05 1939 – 1945 French Navy

    The war

    A radio operator on board, he enlists in the Navy. The war catches up with him: he is taken prisoner.

  6. Wedding photograph of Jean Tolstoy

    06 1945 Paris

    A normal life, at last

    He comes home. He marries. He opens a shop and gives it a name that will come to matter: Gros Bill.

  7. The crew studying the route before departure, 1954

    07 1954 Oran · Sahara · Dakar

    Operation Gros Bill

    The shop’s name becomes an expedition’s: 15,000 kilometres across West Africa, at the wheel of two Citroën 2CVs.

  8. Jean Tolstoy’s grave, Landos cemetery

    08 1955 Landos, Haute-Loire

    A tragic end

    A year after the Gros Bill expedition, everything stops. He was 34.

The project

A family investigation,
a documentary in the making.

  1. 2018 The first traces
  2. 2025 The investigation begins

After years of complete invisibility, in 2018 the family found the first traces of his existence. The Gros Bill expedition, Africa crossed end to end, the adventure. Before all that, a childhood with no one to hold on to: abandoned, left to fend for himself, then taken into care before he was thirteen. And all the while he carried that name — the name of a direct descendant of Leo Tolstoy.

The questions remain, every one of them. How does a child of that line grow up alone, with his name protecting him from nothing? That family memory, silent until now, shaped the way we picture ourselves.

In 2025, Kévin, Sylvain and Nicolas set out to answer them. Court records, digitised press archives, registers, letters: piece by piece, an improbable life comes back together.

From social exclusion to a private struggle, by way of the ties to Leo Tolstoy’s doctrine, this documentary project sets out to bring those interwoven threads into the light, to break the chains of injustice, and to show how much it matters to know your own history.

To finish writing the script, to carry on digitising the material we have gathered, to film further scenes, to edit, mix and release the documentary — we need your support.

Support the project

Documentary project in development · archive research under way

Support the project

Write to the team

Your message goes straight to Kévin, Sylvain and Nicolas, who are leading the investigation. A donation, an archive document, a family memory, a lead worth following: it all counts.

Or write to us: jean@nlion.fr