'Tolstoy: A Russian Life'

TOLSTOY: A Russian Life, by Rosamund Bartlett. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 544 pp., $35.

This month marks 100 years since the death of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who lived a life more tempestuous, contradictory, telling and complex than any of the characters he created.

The author of "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" has been subjected to biographical treatment many times and has survived all intact, including Henri Troyat's majestic account.

The newest tale of the titan, "Tolstoy: A Russian Life," comes from Rosamund Bartlett, an English scholar who specializes in Russian cultural history. Her books include "Chekhov: Scenes from A Life" and translations of Chekhov's writings.

Tolstoy was "tied to Russia body and soul," Bartlett writes. You'll learn about both.

Her leisurely, sympathetic take on Tolstoy offers a perspective different from earlier ones. She concentrates much less on the literature than on the man; the aristocrat who'd dress like a peasant, the sybarite who'd turn ascetic, the nihilist who'd extol piety, the "devout Orthodox communicant" who'd become a critic of the church.

It's also, in a way, attuned to this era of reality TV. Bartlett looks at Tolstoy's family life, especially his troubled marriage. This guy was no fun around the dacha. There are instances when he seems sprung from the imagination of Dostoevsky.

For all the social, political and theological views that would mark his life as "conscience of the nation," Tolstoy held a very conservative, very common outlook when it came to wife Sonya's role: she'd give birth to children. But Tolstoy often neglected them even as he wanted to mold and educate her "according to his own tastes."

The much younger Sonya accepted that stricture for a very long time. She'd also try to kill herself more than once, and eventually would be diagnosed as paranoid and hysterical. Sonya finally feared poverty. Tolstoy, in his will, wanted to put all his writing after 1881 in the public domain.

Their estrangement culminated with the exit of the 82-year old Tolstoy, who "had long yearned to leave home and set off on foot with nothing but the clothes on his back as a wanderer." He left in the middle of the night with his personal physician so she couldn't follow him.

But Tolstoy became ill. Once "the most famous man in Russia," he died in a "remote railroad station in Ryazan province."

Sonya, who'd attempted to drown herself when she learned he'd left her, was kept by his friends from seeing him until he was unconscious. Sonya would write her account of life with "an impossible genius." Her own last years, Bartlett says, "were ones of loneliness and self-recrimination."

Bartlett covers much more, of course, in an extensively researched text, from the history of the family to how the Bolsheviks and the Soviets sought to celebrate and claim him, how the Tolstoyans fared after his death and what influence he may have in today's Russia.

It's all informed, often engrossing. But, by story's end, what lingers is the haunting opening line of "Anna Karenina": "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."