Part intellectual biography and part history of religious ideas in genre, this book covers a range of topics such as conversion in the age of modernity, conversion and the fate of realist art, and Tolstoy's conversion in the context of religious and literary history of his homeland and Europe. While seriously rethinking the chronology and dynamic of Tolstoy's religious development, the author explains the great writer's deep indebtedness to the philosophy of religion of his time and its narratives.