Tolstoy up close …

… Patient No. 1. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Henri Troyat’s biography of the great novelist reads like a great novel itself. Here is the princeling of fairytale childhood, here the restless youth, the soldier of the Caucasus and the Crimea, the gambler, the drunkard, the womanizer, the artist who despises aesthetes, the bear hunter, the devoted husband and family man, the landowner who denounces private property, the conscience-stricken aristocrat who plays at being a muzhik, the guru of universal love adored by millions who explodes his marriage and family while preaching a Christianity stripped of miracles.