The Forged Coupon

This vivid portrait of Leo Tolstoy traces a life and art driven by moral passion, spiritual hunger, and an unflinching sympathy for ordinary people. From his letters with Countess Alexandra A. Tolstoy to his marriage with Sophie Andreevna Bers, the reader sees Tolstoy in intimate self-revelation: restless, candid, and increasingly shaped by nature, love, service, and conscience. His greatness is set against the Russian temperament itself—its emotional intensity, metaphysical curiosity, fatalism, and closeness to the land—while his admiration for peasant life and common soldiers reveals the source of his deepest artistic power in War and Peace and his peasant tales. The book also follows Tolstoy's growing estrangement from Church, State, and literary society, as personal suffering and war sharpen his rejection of violence, superficiality, and social injustice. The unforgettable Plato Karataev embodies his ideal of humble, natural goodness, while the symbolic oak tree mirrors Prince Andre's and Tolstoy's own movement from despair toward renewal. Alongside this spiritual biography runs a darker political and criminal drama: revolutionary agitation, official repression, Katia Turchaninova's desperate failed assassination attempt, and Stepan's brutal killing spree, which ends not in triumph but in psychological torment and self-accusing guilt. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.