Leo Tolstoy

When he arrived in Moscow in 1851, a young Leo Tolstoy set himself three immediate aims: to gamble, to marry and to obtain a post. At that time he managed only the first. The writers momentous life would be full of forced breaks and abrupt departures, from the death of his beloved parents to an abandonment of the social class into which he had been born. Andrei Zorin skilfully pieces together Tolstoys life, offering an account of the novelists deepest feelings and motives, and a brilliant interpretation of his major works, including the celebrated novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.