An unconventional new biography focuses on the great writer's work as a philosopher and activist

The strange, spiritual life of Leo Tolstoy - Biography - Salon.com:

It is easy enough to lament, with Turgenev and Chekhov, the great writer’s inattention to literary matters in the latter part of his life. It is also easy to laugh at the myriad ways in which he failed to practice what he preached, and at his gross vanity and monstrous ego. But countless people found inspiration in Tolstoy’s proselytism. The 25-year-old Mohandas Gandhi, a lawyer in South Africa, read his tract “The Kingdom of God Is Within You” and found there the courage of his own convictions. Ludwig Wittgenstein found in Tolstoy’s “Gospel in Brief” a lifeline that kept him sane through the First World War. And as Bartlett demonstrates, Tolstoy played a key role in the changes Russian society underwent leading up to 1917.