Books: A Billy-Goat Pining for Purity TOLSTOY

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De Courcel generally lets Tolstoy's feelings for his homeland emerge from his writings. Wilson sums up his subject's ambivalent love of country with a bold stroke of his own: "On the one hand, you know that you have been born into a 'God-bearing' nation, whose destiny is to keep burning the flame of truth while the other nations languish in decadence. (The truth may be Orthodox Christianity or the creeds of Marxist-Leninism, but the feeling is the same.) You know that the Russians are best at everything from poetry to gymnastics, and that they invented everything: ballet, bicycles, the internal combustion engine. You know that Russia has more soul than any other country -- that its birch avenues, its snows, its ice, its summers are all the more glorious than the manifestations of nature in more benighted countries. There is only one drawback, which is that it is completely horrible to live there."

Born in 1828 into one of Old Russia's aristocratic families, Tolstoy had the luxury of pondering the chasm between the privileged few and the impoverished masses. His early heroes were the Decembrists, a group of liberal noblemen who tried and failed to end Czar Nicholas I's tyranny. Tolstoy's first career was as a soldier in the Crimean War, where he saw a great deal of action in brothels and gambling dens. But he also wrote the accounts of the siege of Sevastopol that established his literary reputation.

Both biographers amply illustrate the heightened consciousness that made Tolstoy's journals and fiction irresistible. And painful. A week before his marriage to 18-year-old Sophia Behrs in 1862, he asked her to read his diaries. A 20-year record of wenching jumped off the pages. One entry confessed his passion for a peasant mistress only weeks before his wedding date. Twenty-eight years later, Sophia was still feeling the jolt. "I don't think I ever recovered from the shock of reading Lyovochka's diaries when I was engaged to him," she wrote in her own journal. "I can still remember the agonising pangs of jealousy, the horror of that first appalling experience of male depravity."

Countess Tolstoy's private jottings are as famous as those of her husband. Read jointly, their volumes are evidence of what Wilson calls "an atmosphere of domestic hatred perhaps unrivalled in the history of matrimony." To the usual problems of marriage, Tolstoy added his tortured asceticism. Eventually he was repulsed by all things that gave him pleasure, including the writing of great romances and the love of his wife. Yet their earlier years together had been physically satisfying and artistically fulfilling. Sophia bore 13 children in 26 years. Her editorial skills were essential to the labor and delivery of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. She also made sure that publishers paid top ruble.