Count Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then publicly renounced them as counterfeit art, tried to give away his wealth and copyrights, and died at 82 of pneumonia in a remote railway station after fleeing his family in the night. This deep dive traces the wildly contradictory life of a man who began as an orphaned, gambling-addicted Russian noble, fled his debts into the Crimean War, and emerged from the siege of Sevastopol as a pioneer of literary realism.

We follow his radicalization at a Paris guillotine execution in 1857, his meeting with the anarchist Proudhon, the peasant schools he founded after the emancipation of the serfs, and his volatile marriage to Sophia Behrs, who hand-copied War and Peace and ran the estate while he wrote. Then we examine the moral crisis that drove him to hide ropes and guns from himself, his rebuilding of a worldview around Schopenhauer, the Sermon on the Mount, and Henry George’s ideas on land, and how his philosophy of nonviolent resistance traveled through Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.

• Why Tolstoy rejected the label of novel for War and Peace and set out to dismantle the great man theory of history
• The logical chain that turned absolute pacifism into a rejection of the state and private property
• His excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901 and his conversion to vegetarianism after visiting a Tula slaughterhouse
• A Letter to a Hindu, Tolstoy Farm, and the direct line to the American civil rights movement
• How the Soviet Union co-opted a pacifist anarchist into the best-selling author of a totalitarian regime