Leo Tolstoy was a walking contradiction: aristocrat and peasant sympathizer, sensualist and ascetic, patriarch and anarchist. Rosamund Bartlett's biography captures this massive figure in all his complexity, from the young officer who wrote about war with unprecedented honesty to the old man who renounced his novels as worthless and sought to live according to principles that drove his family to despair. Bartlett, a scholar of Russian culture, draws on extensive archival research including material unavailable to previous biographers. She places Tolstoy within Russian history and culture more thoroughly than Western biographies often manage, showing how his life intersected with serfdom's abolition, the revolutionary movement, and the Orthodox Church's reaction. The biography covers his literary achievement in detail, analyzing how War and Peace and Anna Karenina revolutionized the novel, but gives equal attention to his later religious and political writings, which contemporaries often found more important than his fiction. Bartlett examines his marriage to Sophia, their collaboration and conflicts, and the family dynamics that produced both great literature and great suffering. Tolstoy's attempt to give away his property, his flight from home at eighty-two, and his death at a railway station all receive careful attention. Readers seeking to understand this towering figure's life and times will find Bartlett's biography authoritative and engaging.