Tolstoy

In this definitive portrait of one of the greatest novelists of all time, Leo Tolstoy embodies the most extraordinary contradictions. He was a wealthy aristocrat who preached the virtues of poverty and the peasant life, a misogynist who wrote Anna Karenina, and a supreme writer who declared: “Literature is rubbish.” Yet his titanic personality and the astonishing range of his talents and interests made him, as an author and as a strange self-proclaimed prophet, one of the undisputed literar...