Eighty-two-year-old Leo Tolstoy, the patriarch of Russian literature, a sage of international renown revered by the people and feared by the government, has only one serious adversary: his loving wife Sonya. In the fall of 1910, readers around the world, in Berlin, London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo scramble for the latest edition of the local newspapers to read about the Tolstoys' marriage break up. Tsar Nicolas II curtails his holiday in Germany and hastily returns to Russia, where police and a cavalry detachment surround a remote railway station besieged by a crowd of thousands. Is this a beginning of a revolution? Well, almost. And it all started with a domestic dispute. Based on several biographies, personal memoirs, the Tolstoy diaries, and eye-witness accounts, The War of the Tolstoys tells the story of the crumbling marriage of two strong-willed individuals-and of family division, jealousy, madness, and greed-ending in Leo's ill-fated dash for freedom.