The definitive portrait of one of the greatest novelists of all time

Tolstoy was a mass o the most extraordinary contradictions: a wealthy aristocrat who preached the virtues of poverty and the peasant life; a misogynist who wrote Anna Karenina; a supreme writer who delared, '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 giants of the nineteenth century. This masterly biogaphy by leading French novelist (born in Russia), itself long established as a classic, shows why.