AS death approaches, the demands on Leo Tolstoy increase.

His disciples want his works to be left to the world; his wife wants his entire estate, and has driven herself to madness worrying about her husband's will.

Tolstoy is torn between the two, between the earthly and the spiritual, and is eventually forced to flee to seek a peaceful death elsewhere.

This is a dramatic and brilliantly realised account of the great Russian writer's strange final days, which moves effortlessly between fact and fiction.