Tortured Noble The Story of Leo Tolstoy

During his life, Count Leo Tolstoy was the most famous of the great Russian writers in his era. Although his great novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, are set among the vast nation's aristocracy, Tolstoy was able to infuse the lives of his aristocratic characters with the same dreams, aspirations, and frustrations that marked the lives of many of his readers, regardless of their social class. Tolstoy's genius for creating living and breathing characters who attempt to make sense of their lives in the midst of extraordinary conditions, such as total war and doomed love affairs, was born in the turbulence of his own life. Orphaned at a young age, Tolstoy spent his life torn between competing ambitions and desires that pulled him between the extremes of self-disgust and ecstasy, familial love, and the need to reject his family and turn to a life of ascetic purity. Tolstoy's life was one long battle to find security and to escape from crippling self-loathing. This inner struggle forged his genius and compelled him to create some of the most important and memorable fiction of all time. This new biography reveals the outer and interior life of this magnificent artist for a new generation of readers. Book jacket.