Hero or villein?

‘Not one word’, exclaimed Turgenev of Tolstoy, ‘not one movement of his is natural! He is eternally posing before us!’

The recurrent underlying theme of A.N. Wilson’s prize-winning biography of Tolstoy, now re-issued after a quarter of a century, is the novelist as grand impersonator. Wilson (a prolific novelist himself) believes that there is a strong impulse in novelists to don masks or test alter egos, and that this impulse rioted in Tolstoy’s character.

Throughout his long life Tolstoy switched between playing at sad orphan, landowner, libertine, crazed gambler, spiritual elder, holy fool, paterfamilias, historian, village idiot, cobbler and dissident. Sometimes he postured as a bearded prophet, doling out portentous maxims, or as a scruffy bumpkin, mowing ineptly in his fields. He also starred as a haughty, straight-backed nobleman, riding over his coverts with proprietorial eyes which spotted broken fences; sometimes as a callous, jaded metropolitan who exulted in those salons and court antechambers which are evoked in War and Peace, but who also flitted querulously amidst the intelligentsia.