To reconcile Tolstoy the pure artist with Tolstoy the demonridden preacher is the formidable task challenging his biographer. It has been superbly met by Henri Troyat…. His Tolstoy is worthy not only to stand on the same shelf as Ernest Simmons' classic 1946 biography, but with the works of its subject as well.

This may seem an extravagant claim to those familiar with Troyat's own rather middling novels and his shoddily fictionalized biography of Dostoyevsky, Firebrand. Nevertheless, something seems to have happened to Troyat in recent years, for his present work is scrupulously researched, vividly written without recourse to fictional devices, and above all, acutely sensitive to Tolstoy's peculiar greatness without being adulatory.

If Troyat comes up with no glib key to the enigma of Tolstoy's personality, our disappointment is mitigated by the corresponding lack of spurious post-mortem psychoanalysis. (p. 1)

A more serious flaw in the book than its...