Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was in every sense a giant of a man— one of the world’s greatest novelists, the author of such colossal works as War and Peace and Anna Karenina; a man of passionate desires he could neither control nor forgive himself for indulging; a stupendous egotist who abused his wife and tormented his family even as he was preaching the brotherhood of all men.

In Tolstoy, accomplished novelist and biographer A. N. Wilson narrates with dazzling, witty, wonderfully readable prose the complex drama of the writer’s life-his childhood of aristocratic privilege literary genius, his increasingly disastrous marriage. Wilson sweeps away the long-held belief that Tolstoy’s works were the exact mirror of his life, and instead traces the roots of Tolstoy’s art to his relationship with God, with women, and with Russia.

He also breaks new ground in re-creating the world that shaped the great novelist’s life and art—the turmoil of ideas and politics in nineteenth-century Russia and the incredible literary renaissance that made Tolstoy’s work possible. Most of all, Wilson fathoms, as no other biographer has done, the true nature of Tolstoy the man.