Russian language. His novels Aelita (1923) about a journey to Mars and The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (1927) have gained immense public popularity. The former spawned a pioneering sci-fi movie in 1924. His supernatural short story, Count Cagliostro, reportedly inspired the 1984 film Formula of Love. He penned several books for children, starting with Nikita's Childhood, a memorable account of his early years (the book is sometimes mistakenly believed to be about his son, Nikita; in truth, however, he only used the name because it was his favorite – and he would later give it to his eldest son). In 1936, he created an adaptation of the famous Italian fairy tale about Pinocchio entitled the Adventures of Buratino or The Golden Key, whose main character, Buratino, quickly became hugely popular among the Soviet populace. The creator of the Moscow Children's Theatre, Natalya Sats spent several months persuading him to write the work, and finally won him over by supplying his wife with foreign fashion magazines. He is also suspected of being the main author of a libelous and partly pornographic literary fraud entitled Vryubova's Diary published in 1927, on instruction from the authorities, to discredit the Russian royal family. Anna Vyrubova was the lady-in-waiting to the Empress Alexandra, consort of Nicholas II, about whom there had been scandalous rumours of sexual relations with Rasputin or with the Tsar or his consort, all of which she denied when under arrest after the revolution. The 'diary' was "a vulgar and dirty forgery". In 1974, a minor planet was discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova and named 3771 Alexejtolstoj after the Red Count. Comments While Tolstoy enjoyed huge popularity and success in Russia in his lifetime, western assessments of him have been generally negative because of his role as a Stalin apologist. Nikolai Tolstoy's summation of his distant relative was that "His personal character was without question beneath contempt ... in Stalin, he found a worthy master. Few families have produced a higher literary talent than Leo Tolstoy, but few have sunk to one as degraded as Alexei Nikolaevich. Professor Gleb Struve, a former White Army soldier and committed anti-Communist, who became a leading authority on 20th century Russian literature reckoned that: Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoy is, without doubt, one of the most gifted Russian writers of the 20th century … But—and this is the point—this man, endowed with so many extraordinary gifts and