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 literary giants of the nineteenth century. From his famously bad marriage to his enormously successful career, Troyat presents a brilliant portrait that reads like an epic novel written by Tolstoy himself.