Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina — two of the greatest novels ever written — then renounced fiction, gave away his fortune, dressed as a peasant, and spent his final decades preaching a radical form of Christian anarchism that influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The man who could write the interior life of a dying horse or a woman falling in love decided literature itself was insufficient.

This episode traces Tolstoy from his aristocratic youth through his military service, the novels that made him the most famous writer in the world, and the spiritual crisis that split his family and transformed him into a prophet of nonviolent resistance.

• Tolstoy’s aristocratic origins and the Crimean War experience that haunted his fiction
• The writing of War and Peace and Anna Karenina — how he produced two masterpieces in a decade
• The spiritual crisis that made him renounce wealth, fiction, and the Russian Orthodox Church
• His influence on Gandhi, King, and the global nonviolent resistance movement