Leo Tolstoy is usually remembered as one man with one greatness, either the novelist who wrote the largest book in the world or the moralist who tried to live by the Sermon on the Mount and refused all comfort. Both portraits leave something out. They leave out the third Tolstoy, the one who walked behind a plough at sixty, who quarrelled with his wife about the price of boots, who wrote to a tsar and to a peasant in the same week, who at eighty-two left his own house at night and died on a railway platform without telling anyone where he was going.

This book argues that the three Tolstoys were never separate men and never failed versions of one man. They were three sides of a single human structure, the same structure that lives in every listener who has ever felt larger and stranger than the role assigned to them. Tolstoy was unusual only in scale. He was a moralist who could not stop being a sensualist, a sensualist who could not stop being a saint, a saint who could not stop being a count with land and children and a difficult wife. The wholeness of a person, this book proposes, is not the smoothing away of such contradictions. It is the holding of all of them at once, at full size, without flinching.

Through the late tracts, the great novels, the brutal late stories, and the long strange life that ended at Astapovo, the book follows Tolstoy across all three of his philosophies, the one he preached, the one he wrote, and the one he lived. It also makes a wider claim. Great minds, from Tolstoy to Einstein, are not great because they tamed their contradictions. They are great because they did not try. To amputate any one side of a person is to lose the weight of the whole. The wicked saint is not a paradox. The wicked saint is what a real human being looks like, seen without flattery.