Few writers and thinkers have had the widespread, long-lasting influence of Russia's Leo Tolstoy. Besides creating War and Peace and Anna Karenina, two of the most celebrated novels in world literature, Tolstoy was a philosopher whose theories of Christian behavior inspired civil rights leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. A member of the nobility who renounced his wealth and position, Tolstoy was held in such high esteem by his countrymen that during his lifetime he was called Russia's "second czar." "If he had merely been a great artist turned into a moral preacher, which is the trite explanation of his development, he would not have been nearly so significant or so human," Hugh l'Anson Fausset explained in Poets and Pundits: Essays and Addresses. "But he was at one and the same time a supreme imaginative writer and the most formidable moralist of the last...